Rising Shadow has posted the cover art and synopsis of the upcoming novel Lockstep by Karl Schroeder, due out in March 2014. Sounds like a YA space opera.

Here’s the synopsis:
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What’s better than steampunk airship pirates encased in weightless bubble of air orbiting the star Virga? Why those very same airship pirates in comic form, free for all to read!

Karl Schroeder is working with Blind Ferret to adapt his first book in the Virga series, Sun of Suns as an online, serialized comic, and it looks great. The series itself is also a lot of fun to read, mixing hard science fiction with pirates and lots of cool action, so check those books out if you haven’t.

A new page of the comic will be released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, along with a blog post. Currently there are 12 pages up for your perusal. If you really, really can’t wait to see it all, you can purchase the 4 issue set from Comixology, which allows you to see it on your tablet of choice. I really like reading comics on my Touchpad so try that out if you haven’t. On your tablet, not mine…

[via Tobias Buckell]

[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

Recently, a group of futurists predicted that artificial intelligence is a deadlier threat to humanity than any sort of natural disaster, nuclear war, or large objects falling from the sky. In an article by Ross Anderson at AeonMagazine.com, David Dewey, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute says, concerning the human brain and probability “If you had a machine that was designed specifically to make inferences about the world, instead of a machine like the human brain, you could make discoveries like that much faster.” He stated that “An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels.” He also talked about how programming an AI with empathy wouldn’t be easy, that the steps it might take to “maximize human happiness”, for example, are not things that we might consider acceptable, but to an AI would seem exceedingly efficient.

Of course, this leads into much more complex discussion, and the possibilities with AI are vast and varied.

We asked this week’s panelists…

Here’s what they said…

• If you make an intelligent being, you must give it civil rights.
• On the other hand, you cannot give the vote to a computer program. “One man, one vote” — and how many copies of the program would you need to win an election? Programs can merge or can generate subprograms.
• Machines can certainly become a part of a human. Our future may see a merging of humans and machines.
• Or all of the above. Keep reading science fiction. We always get there first.

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

A lot of recent science fiction appears to take place on Earth, and only a minority of space-based science fiction taking place outside the solar system. Novels and stories involving travel to the stars and interstellar travel seems to be out-of-date or out-of-fashion, and even Hard SF treatments of interstellar travel seem as realistic as Star Wars.

We asked this week’s panelists:

Here’s what they said…

I think that like everything else, fads in science fiction run in cycles, and lately there’s been a big ol’ dystopian wave going on. But it’s not as if deep space science fiction, or SF featuring far-flung space civilizations isn’t still being written. Charlie Stross, Iain Banks, Dan Simmons, Greg Bear, Chris Moriarty, C.J. Cherryh–heck, I’ve written a couple of books dealing with far-flung space travel myself.

If you were to nudge the focus of the question over to whether near-future and near-earth SF has been getting more *awards* attention lately, I think you’d be more accurate.

But there are fads in criticism the same as everything else.

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Recorded at Boskone…

[via Singularity Hub]

This week’s topic comes from Madeline Ashby:

Read on to see the picks of this week’s illustrious panelists.

[Note: Following the responses will be a completely unscientific (but fun) list of The Top 14 Anime Films of All Time!]

I’ll peg my faves as being:

1. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Asks some interesting questions about identity that pick up where the first GITS movie left off. Honourable mention also goes to GITS and GITS: Stand Alone Compex.)
2. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki can do no wrong. It was this, or Princess Mononoke, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or …)
3. Haibane Renmei (Haunting, weird exploration of self-discovery, death, and the loss of innocence via allegory)
4. Akira (Just Because. Okay?)
5. Serial Experiment Lain (More on identity and communication — you’re probably detecting a theme here, right?)

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• Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast-interviews Kay Kenyon (City Without End).
• Blogging the Muse interviews Patricia Bray.
• The Willamette Writers honored Phyllis Irene Radford with a lifetime achievement award.
• Jayme Lynn Blaschke has the scoop on SFWA’s statement regarding the proposed Google book settlement.
• Authors reviewing books: Paul Di Filippo reviews Karl Schroeder’s The Sunless Countries.
• Jason Heller is Fantasy Magazine‘s new Book Editor.
• Cherie Priest’s thoughts on steampunk.
• Bibliophile Stalker on The Difficulty of Pricing eBooks (Part II).
• io9 lists Top 10 Silliest Alien Prosthetics.
• Star Wars Tidbits:
  • Boing Boing showcases these nerdy-but-cool Star Wars trash compactor bookends.
  • I watched this dozens of times, but I couldn’t find anything sexist in this video of Girls in Bikinis Reading Lines from Star Wars.
  • Star Wars Zombies. How did nobody think of this before?