SF Tidbits for 1/29/08
By John DeNardo |
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at
12:25 am
- WICN’s Inquiry has a radio interview with Gary Westfahl about his book Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction. [via Locus Online]
- SciFi Wire profiles Philip Palmer, author of Debatable Space.
- Bibliophile Stalker interviews Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem (The Man on the Ceiling). “I really like the unique challenges of the novel, but for overall fun with the process, I don’t think you can beat the short story…”
- SciFi Weekly Editor Scott Edelman looks back at 2007 by way of a quiz: match the quote with the author who said it.
- 2007: The Best of the Year by Jeff VanderMeer and 2007: Recommended Reading by Claude Lalumière.
- Veoh is hosting a 47-minute film of Terry Bisson’s “Incident at Oak Ridge”. Watch the trailer. [via Locus Online]
- Eos offers up a PDF reading guide for the sf/f classics A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; Lord of Light and The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny; The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart; The Forever War by Joe Haldeman; Burning Chrome by William Gibson; Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress; Gold by Isaac Asimov; My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due; and The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold.
- Alan DeNiro reviews The New Space Opera. “…how do contemporary practitioners of space opera respond to the challenge of keeping the form relevant?” [via Mumpsimus]
- Recently free fiction at ManyBooks.net: “Out Like a Light” (1960) and “Anything You Can Do …” (1963) by Randall Garrett.
- John Klima continues his how-to series: So You Want to Start A Zine, Part 8.
- Over at Books Under the Bridge, the thoughtful essay Spitting in the Eye of the Technological Singularity defines The Singularity as (1) A Buzzword that Leverages the Mystique of Artificial Intelligence, (2) Magic Masquerading as Science, and (3) A Crutch for Sci-Fi Writers. Discuss.
- Meanwhile, Ultratech Memes talks about What Sci-Fi gets wrong about Human Nature: “When science fiction is at its best, it’s about much more than spaceships and rayguns. It’s about ideas.”
- Popular Mechanics compares all the Terminators. [via Whedonesque]
- Real Science: The Center for Science Writings lists The Stevens Seventy Greatest Science Books.
- Great White Snark lists Real-Life Celebrities Who Should Fight Zombies in Comics and Movies.
- A funny thing that needs no introduction: Batman vs. Robin.
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 8/6/07
- SF Tidbits for 12/31/07
- SF Tidbits for 9/22/07
- SF Tidbits for 12/13/07
- SF Tidbits for 1/1/08
Filed under: Tidbits
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Eos are stretching it a bit in referring to something like Gold as a science fiction classic… Same for The Curse of Chalion, though for different reasons.
The article about the singularity is spot on.
I never did realize why everyone was so over-excited about the concept of an AI as far as to decide it will change absolutely *everything*.
Now, when someone writes a good story about it (e.g. Stross), then I have no problem at all with the individual story. But turning it into this major all-encompassing theme that every other writer feels the need to address, that’s going too far.
For more information about Hugo Gernsback follow this link;
http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Gernsback-Well-Ahead-Time/dp/1419658573/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201631219&sr=8-1&tag=sfsi0c-20
It will take you to Amazon and a new biography about his life. The manuscript was found when I was in the process of closing down Gernbsback Publications in 2003. It was written sometime in the 1950′s.
Yaron, thanks for reading my article about the Singularity. I’ve thought the concept was silly from the day I first read about it. Writing down the reasons why it doesn’t make sense was very cathartic.
If it was the first time people started to think about AI as a concept, I might have understood the enthusiasm. But we passed many AIs in SF along the way (Or did anyone fail to notice the fact that all those thinking robots are AIs as well?), had various good plots that were singularity-free, and nobody seemed to miss it.
Beside that, what are we worried about? If we do manage to create AIs which are smarter than us, they’d have to be a lot more worried about the singularity than we do, no? We want to build smart thinking computers because we could use the help. Those computers would, probably, need less help. So what will be their excuse for creating smarter computers that would consider them inferior and change the rules of the game for them?
Yeah, the more I think about the “Singularity,” the more problems I find with it. I may have to write a follow-up article on it at some point.