<![CDATA[io9: Must Read]]> http://ganja.gawkerassets.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: Must Read]]> http://io9.com/tag/must read http://io9.com/tag/must read <![CDATA[The Truth about George R.R. Martin, Women and Rape]]> Alyssa Rosenberg over at Think Progress has a must-read essay in response to claims that George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is too brutal towards women. She deconstructs feminist writer Sady Doyle's critiques of Martin's narrative with amazing elegance, and along the way she also delivers a great lesson in how to write about nerd entertainment in a constructive, rather than pointlessly sneering, fashion. Well worth checking out. [Think Progress] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5835559&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Gene Roddenberry's 1973 letter: Star Trek was about people, not hardware]]> A 1973 letter from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to a fan is worth reading. He explains that Trek had no "magic formula" other than focusing on people. And Spock looked like the Devil because it was "provocative to women." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5561531&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Two Literary Superstars Publishing Science Fiction Novels Soon]]> The trend of literary authors veering into science fiction shows no sign of slowing down, as science fiction remains the best way to talk about our weird era. Ian McEwan and Rick Moody both have SF books in the pipeline. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5483066&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[One Author's List Of Quite Possibly Essential Science Fiction Includes William Gibson — And Event Horizon]]> Vinconium and Light author M. John Harrison posted a list of "some interesting science fiction" that's been causing lots of discussion — it's not framed as a list of essential SF reading, or the greatest SF books of all time, just books that "turned [Harrison] on when he read them." And yet, it looks like a pretty great stab at a new SF canon, including somewhat neglected authors like Pat Cadigan and Justina Robson along with William Gibson and Samuel Delany. Most provocatively of all, he sneaks just a few movies in there, including some unlikely candidates like Flatliners and Event Horizon. The best thing of all about Harrison's list? It's almost certainly got some titles you haven't read yet on it. [Ambiente Hotel] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5254959&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[10 Alan Moore Comics You Must Read! (Besides Watchmen)]]> With next week's movie coming out, everybody's rediscovering the awesomeness of Watchmen. But there are tons of other mind-expanding Alan Moore comics that you should also check out. Here are our favorites. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5159888&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Punk-Rock Poet Is Japan's Second Least Popular Robot]]> Science fiction poetry usually leaves me cold, but I would love it if it was more like the scarred, funny poetry of Bucky Sinister. One of his books totally earns its title, Whiskey And Robots. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5112453&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[A Rock Star With An Emotional Megaphone]]> One of the coolest books I read for the Tiptree Awards last spring was Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge. This collection of short stories deals with pain and sensuality, performance and art. And the best piece in the book is the main novella, about a rock band who use a new technology that enables the audience to feel the lead singer's twisted emotions. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5095261&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Jonathan Lethem Returns To Science Fiction, With A Gorgeous Downer Of A Story]]> Jonathan Lethem has a haunting new story of astronauts stranded on a space station in this week's New Yorker. "Lostronaut" is a depressingly bleak, yet beautiful, story told in the form of an astronaut's letters home to a loved one. It's the most science fictional thing I've seen from Lethem in ages, and also one of my favorite pieces of his writing ever. And it's the first piece of science fiction the New Yorker has seen fit to publish in ages. Spoilers ahead. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5083920&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The Most Demented Novel Of All Time]]> If someone put a gun to your head and said you had to write a book that lived up to the title Time Snake And Superclown, you might just kiss your brains goodbye and have done with it. But not Vincent King, author of the cult novel Candy Man. His 1976 classic more than lives up to that title, and may actually be the most demented book I've ever read. It's the book that taught me that if a man fails to please a woman sexually, she has the right to remake his face permanently into a bizarre clown mask. Spoilers ahead. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5082454&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Read SF, Save Money - And Your Country]]> October 2 was a red-letter day for anyone who reads. After all, it's not every day that a high-quality, groundbreaking SF publisher offers up a totally affordable package of their entire collection — but on Thursday, Small Beer Press announced that they are doing just that. And their purpose isn't just to clean out the warehouse: They're donating 20% of sale proceeds to Barack Obama's presidential campaign, proving that smart literature and thoughtful activism go hand-in-hand. It gets better, too; even the empty-walleted will come out winners. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5058990&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[William Barton Is The Great Unsung Space Opera Writer]]> Space opera and military science fiction are huge again, but I'm not aware of anybody publishing the type of wonderfully nihilistic space adventures that William Barton used to write in the 1990s. Barton, with occasional co-author Michael Capobianco, put out a dozen books that show how oppression and exploitation aren't crimes that bad people commit — they're part of the fabric of civilization. Here's why you should be hunting down every Barton novel you can find, with spoilers for a couple of his books. In William Barton's books, the strong exploit the weak — until someone stronger comes along, and exploits them in turn. And the universe rattles on, uncaring. As a character says in Alpha Centauri by Barton and Capobianco, it's do or die — and even if you do, you'll still die anyway. Oh well. My favorite William Barton novel is probably When Heaven Fell, where a cybernetic Master Race takes over Earth and kills eight billion humans. The rest become slaves, soldiers, or mercenaries like the novel's hero Athol Morrison. Athol comes back to Earth after twenty years away, and finds that his high school sweetheart is involved in helping to plan an uprising against the alien overlords. Morrison knows the uprising will probably fail, and then the aliens will retaliate, wiping out what's left of the human race. So after much dithering, he rats out the human resistance to the aliens, in exchange for saving his girlfriend's life. Later, he gets involved with a more sophisticated resistance effort involving a number of subjugated races. But it seems pretty doomed as well, and in the novel's final twist, we learn that the Master Race didn't come to Earth seeking new realms to conquer — they came here fleeing an even stronger, meaner empire from Andromeda. And now the people who kicked the Master Race's ass are coming to our galaxy. The Master Race will be conquered, and humans will probably end up "the slaves of slaves." (He cites the historical precedent of the Huns smashing the Roman Empire, when the Huns were actually fleeing the stronger Chinese.) The weirdest Barton novel may well be Acts Of Conscience, where the hero (?) Gaetan comes across a planet whose inhabitants include a race called dollies, who happen to be perfectly suited to be sex toys for humans. The Dollies are furry and cute, and look sort of like little girls, but they also secrete hormones that spark arousal in human males. A group of humans want to round up all the Dollies and ship them off to be used by humans, which will wipe out the species in the process. In the most nauseating scene, Gaetan struggles with his conscience (and the nagging voice of his spacesuit) — and then he goes ahead and has sex with a dollie anyway:
Dollie looking up at me out of empty, featureless eyes, as though waiting. I put my hand on its belly, petting soft fur, felt it squirm with what seemed like pleasure, listened to its resumed purr. A cat, they say, does not purr out of pleasure. Humans don't care why it purrs, merely make the assumptions that please them most. No reason to do this. You're just full of alien pheromones, pheromones tricking your reproductive physiology into thinking... hell. Think of it like a nice drug. Like a masturbation aid. Like the vidnet girls. Just get your dick out and take care of yourself, that's all. No one will know but you and the dollies. Who would they tell? Who would care? ... The spacesuit whispered, Gaetan. Shut the fuck up. Go away. I crawled on top of the dollie and just like that, I was in. Wet. Warm. Sticky like raw egg white. Just like a woman. That's it. In. Out. In. Out. The dollie looked up at my face as I fucked it, eyes like bits of glass, purring steadily away, as if I were still only . . .
And after he's done basically raping an alien life form, he starts to cry. (Although I get the impression the dollie doesn't think of what just happened as sex.) And later he finally decides to save the dollies, and the other intelligent life forms on the planet whom the humans have exploited and killed for entertainment. Even if it dooms the human race (at the hands of a vastly more advanced life form) in the process. The scene where the aliens beg for his help is typically cynical. Writes Barton: "How does it feel to be bargaining with the devil? For that matter, how does it feel to be the devil with whom the downtrodden must bargain?" Since the 1990s, Barton hasn't published any more novels, but his stories still appear in Asimov's Science Fiction and other magazines. With the explosion of new publishers like Nightshade and Pyr, putting out new books by other neglected greats like Richard Kadrey, I can't help but hope we'll see another searingly bitter Barton epic again soon. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5032405&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[A Living Doll Tries to Survive a Workers' Revolution in "The Alchemy of Stone"]]> With a face made of porcelain, a wind-up heart, and a talent for alchemy, Mattie is hardly a typical science fictional robot. While most novels about robots focus on how these humanoid machines are stronger and smarter than humans, Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone (in bookstores this month) explores the vulnerability of mechanical beings who depend on humans for repairs and survival. Mattie is a rare emancipated automaton in an industrial city hovering on the edge of a workers' revolution. She's gone against the wishes of her Mechanic creator and joined the ranks of the biochemist-mystic Alchemists, selling medicines and perfumes to the city's middle class. Sedia's novel captures the surreal strangeness of a city whose power structure is about to be toppled, and her focus on Mattie's relationship with her creator allows her to grapple with the tiny power struggles inherent in all human relationships — especially those between men and women. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5027493&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Get Your Daily Dose of Scifi Authors at Tor.com]]> Tor Books, one of the biggest and most venerable publishers of excellent science fiction writing, has just launched a new blog that promises to bring the crunchy goodness of a Tor book to your RSS reader every day. With contributors like scifi authors Charles Stross and John Scalzi, as well as scifi art maven Irene Gallo and Tor editor Liz Gorinsky, you can expect cool essays on everything from trends in scifi writing to science experiments with testosterone. The best part, though, is that the site will feature regular doses of free fiction. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5027370&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[10 Batman Books You Must Read]]> Click to viewWith The Dark Knight less than two weeks away from opening, now is the time to start pretending that you know all there is to know about Batman in order to impress family and friends alike. To help you do that, we've come up with a list of 10 Essential Batman Books You Must Read, and it's not just the ones that you'd expect. Your Beginner's Guide to Gotham City's Favorite Son awaits you under the jump. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5022294&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[We're All Slaves Of History, In Sprawling Dystopian Novel]]> What would the United States look like after the collapse of everything? The answer isn't a zombie-strewn wasteland or a sudden revival of punk-rock fashions, but rather something more like a flashback to the mid-19th century. The frontier spirit, small communities banding together, roaming Indian tribes... and huge masses of the population living in slavery. Brian Francis Slattery's dystopian second novel, Liberation has many brilliant ideas, but its depiction of a 21st century revival of slavery is really what burns it into your memory. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5019641&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Twelve Books You Should Read at the Beach This Summer]]> It's boiling hot up here in the Earth's northern hemisphere, so hopefully at some point you'll find yourself vacationing at a beach — or at least lounging near a large body of water. And when that happens, you'll need a really awesome scifi adventure to read while you sip a cold drink and pretend you never have to go back to your desk at the Ministry of Information. There are two rules of beach reading: One, the book must be a rollicking good adventure; and two, the tale cannot have a depressing ending. It's summer, ferchrissake! Leave the gloomy, emotionally-draining stuff for winter, OK? With those rules in mind, we've put together a list of twelve excellent books to take to the beach (or lake, or mountains) with you this season. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=396994&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Carthage Must Be Destroyed in New Kushiel Novel]]> If you like alternate history, alternate sexuality, and crazy international intrigue, you won't be able to resist Kushiel's Mercy. In bookstores this month, it's the final adventure in Jacqueline Carey's bestselling, six-novel Kushiel cycle set on a medieval Earth where Christianity never took hold. While the first three novels detailed the adventures of Phedre, a prostitute/spy with the superpower of erotic masochism — you'd be surprised how handy this is as a superpower! — the second three focus on her adoptive son Imriel. At last, in his third and final novel, Imriel is coming into his own. I had nearly given up on the series, despite adoring the Phedre novels, but Kushiel's Mercy was a return to form for Carey. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5018678&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Science That Became Fiction in 2600 Anthology]]> Back in the old days of text files and BBSes — days that hopefully you don't remember, kids — we used to do things like trade warez and pr0n cuz we were 1337 haXOrz man. No really, we were. But the people who were the true hackers of the 1980s and 90s were the people like Emmanuel Goldstein, who ran the underground techno-anarchist zine 2600 for curious, technically-minded people who wanted to learn about things such as tweaking the phone system or lock-picking or social engineering. Articles in 2600 became the stuff of legends, and influenced (for better or worse) movies like Sneakers and Hackers. Now the first-ever collection of these influential early hacker essays is coming out, just in time for the last-ever Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in NYC. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5015953&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Six Astounding Young Adult Novels of the Pre-Potter Era]]> The success of Harry Potter has established that the young adult market in fiction can be insanely lucrative, as have other successful scifi series like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series. Now traditionally adult scifi authors like Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi have released YA novels, and publishers promise more smart YA fiction is on the way. But this is hardly the first time that YA fiction in the scifi genre has flowered: in the 1950s, Scribner's did an entire Juveniles series, with over a dozen novels devoted to teen space adventure (including some of Lester Del Rey and Robert Heinlein's most beloved books). But these weren't the only cool kid scifi books of the pre-Potter era. We've got six more great, old-school YA books for you to rediscover or read for the first time. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5015478&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[UNIX-based A.I. and a Siemens Artificial Womb for Men]]> Need a quick dose of weird, brainy science fiction but don't have time to commit to an entire short story collection? Then consider a new kind of book, from Aqueduct Press, which you might call a short story single, with an A-Side and a B-Side (though both stories get an A from this reader). Plugged In contains "The Man Who Plugged In," by L. Timmel Duchamp and "Kingdom of the Blind" by Maureen McHugh. Both authors were guests of honor at Wiscon in May, and I grabbed a signed copy at that event. We hear that it will soon be available from Aqueduct. Here's what awaits you. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5013216&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Superheroes of the Midwest Unite]]> Given the curve-ballish nature of reality, it makes perfect sense to me that the people who finally develop superpowers will live in Madison, Wisconsin. They won't have a Gotham City or Metropolis packed with a high per-capita rate of supervillains to fight. They'll just be regular people, struggling with ordinary things. That's the premise of David J. Schwartz's forthcoming novel Superpowers, about five college students who develop superhuman abilities from a strange alcoholic concoction at a party. Suddenly, they have to switch out of party mode into great justice mode. And it's not easy. The book has already gotten advance praise from speculative fiction greats Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link. Below we've got a teaser for you. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5013113&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Flying Mutants With A Compulsion To Go To France]]> The latest issue of Gavin Grant and Kelly Link's zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is available now, and it's full of mystifying and bizarre tales that remind me of Link's own unsettling fiction. Maureen McHugh has a weird story about flying mutants who feel a compulsion to go to France, and infect others with the same urge. Carol Emshwiller has a snarky tale about students who hate their writing instructor, which perfectly complements Caleb Wilson's story of weird artists whose paths intersect with a Depression-era mad detective. I love Eileen Gunn's poem where Alice from The Honeymooners builds her own moon-rocket to get away from Ralph. And (shameless self-promotion here) I also have a more-freaky-than-usual story in this issue. You can get the issue as an e-book for a slight discount on the cover price. [Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet at E-Reader] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5012363&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[A Love Story, Told By An Alien Invader]]> The Host, the first adult novel from Stephenie Meyer, is as cheesy as you'd expect from this trailer, which aired during Good Morning America. (Not to mention Meyer's track record as author of the young-adult vampire series Twilight, soon to be a movie.) But The Host is a better class of beach read, thanks to its narrator, an alien who participates in a successful occupation of a conquered Earth. A bizarre love triangle lets Meyer ask questions about human consciousness, and whether the colonizers assimilate the colonized, or vice versa. Spoilers ahead. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=394002&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Aliens Don't Care Enough About Us to Invade]]> The author of over a dozen books, including the well-received Probability trilogy, Nancy Kress loves to thwart our expectations about the future. In her new short story collection Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, out this month, she takes stereotypical SF tales of galactic colonization, alien invasion, and nanotech singularities — and slaps them upside the head. In one story, aliens "invade" Earth by landing a spaceship and just letting it sit in rural Minnesota for centuries; in another, we see the nanotech singularity from the perspective of people in a small prairie town. A story ostensibly about exploring a black hole at the center of the galaxy turns out to be about how AI uploads of people actually have better personalities than their originals. Though often uneven, the collection will tweak your preconceptions enough to stay with you long after you've put it down. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=393520&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[A Perfect Parody of Space Opera Romance in "Moons of Riadorf" — Free Online!]]> If you have ever semi-guiltily read Laurel Hamilton's trashy elf sex novels, or managed the feat of reading John Norman's Gor books while simultaneously rolling your eyes, then today's lunchtime reading, "Under the Moons of Riadorf," will be the perfect diversion for you. Writing under the pen names Claire Rasmussen and Belle Heartley, the authors have created a loving parody of space opera romance about a firey princess who is plotting to overthrow the interstellar regime of the (hot) man she's forced to marry (and have a LOT of sex with). And the writing is hilarious — one of the authors, under her real name, just got a giant book deal with Little, Brown to write a YA novel. Check out some of the first chapter below. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=393686&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Andre Norton's Time Traders Series Free Online]]> If you grew up reading Andre Norton's 1970s YA fiction like Star Ka'at, then you'll want to cast back further into history and check out some of the novels from her Time Traders series, many of which are free online. Today, the resourceful nerds at BoingBoing linked to the third book in the Cold War series that pits time-traveling Soviets against time-traveling U.S. spies. The third book, The Defiant Agents, is about how a group of Apache natives colonize space (yay for getting to be the colonizers this time around?), but the first book (Time Traders) sets the scene by giving us a 1950s-style temporal arms race between the commies and the capitalist pigdogs. Download them both and while away a couple of afternoons. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=392563&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Nano-Noir and Cyber-Godfathers in "The Digital Plague"]]> If you like nano-noir (and who doesn't?), you won't want to miss Jeff Somers' new novel The Digital Plague. The sequel to his book The Electric Church, it's set in a violent urban future you see through the eyes of antihero Avery, a contract killer-cum-cyber-Godfather. Unfortunately he's got a little nano-plague problem. Now the blog Rescued by Nerds has an interesting interview with Somers up on their site, where they ask a very important question: "Infecting your hero with a nanotech virus designed to murder the world is an interesting plot device. How did you come up with the basic plot?" More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=391431&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Environmental Fascists Fight Gun-Loving Lesbians for Alien Technology]]> Two spies, one trained in the art of lying and the other in the art of reading people for signs of subterfuge, have been sent to steal alien technology from Amazonia, a planet ruled by man-enslaving lesbians. Our spies are emissaries from a male-dominated, interplanetary government ruled by ruthless artificial intelligences who enforce carbon neutrality on all worlds by genociding any group that uses too much energy. Their hope is that the alien technology can end the eco-fascist reign of terror by providing an infinite source of renewable energy. This premise for Elizabeth Bear's novel Carnival, published a little over a year ago, is so intriguing that you'll keep reading just to watch the fine machinery of her thought experiment unfold. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=387818&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[20 Science Books Every Scifi Fan (and Writer) Should Read]]> Click to viewYou can't have great science fiction writing without great books about science. Ever since the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin's classics On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man took the reading public by storm, popular science writing has been inspiring fictional thought experiments, as well as possibly less-inspiring political debates. What are the science books you should be reading now if you want your brain turned inside-out by weird new ideas that might just change the world for real? We've got 20 brilliant, and brilliantly-written, science books that have already influenced science fiction — or are about to. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=384242&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[A.I.s Are The Only Witnesses To Murder Over A Toxic Abyss]]> I was incredibly excited when I saw that Adam-Troy Castro, one of my favorite short-story writers, had finally published a novel. And Emissaries From The Dead is as great as I'd hoped, a noirish murder mystery set inside an artificial environment created by A.I.s for some unknown purpose. As with the best detective novels, Andrea Cort's murder investigation uncovers a slew of other mysteries, which unravel the dark secrets of the artificial intelligences and the humans' expedition to study them. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=384419&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[How to Outrun Zombies, and Other Ways to Solve Problems Japanese-Style]]> My new book Urawaza is a collection of over 100 tips and tricks from Japan for honing your survival skills, fine-tuning your appreciation of Japanese culture, and eventually making you superhuman. The book is full of quirky Japanese solutions to common problems, along with scientific explanations of why they work. Imagine, for example, that you need to outrun a flock of zombies, like Will Smith in I Am Legend. With the help of a little old-school Japanese wisdom, you can actually run faster. Find out how! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=381920&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Karen Joy Fowler's Latest Novel is Science Fiction in the Present]]> Bewildered by the death of her father, a woman named Rima finds her balance by plunging into a thicket of half-true tales and half-real avatars on the web. Online, she meets her father again — or at least, the many constructs of him he's left behind via a website he's devoted to his writing, and in the fan fiction people have written about a fictional murderer named after him in a series of mystery novels. Karen Joy Fowler's unsettling, wistful new novel Wit's End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson's recent present-day novels are: Her characters' lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it's hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins. The author of brilliant scifi novel Sarah Canary, and more recently of non-scifi bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, Fowler is back in fine form with Wit's End. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=381726&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Nuclear-Gnome Novel Channels A Punk-Rock Vonnegut]]> In Nick Mamatas' weird political cartoon of a novel, Under My Roof, a man named Daniel Weinberg decides to build his own nuclear bomb out of hundreds of used smoke detectors, and then declares that his house, and its yard, are an independent country named Weinbergia. The bomb, inside a garden gnome, provides the ultimate deterrent thanks to a TV remote control detonator. Meanwhile, Daniel's pubescent son Herbert is a telepath who can read the thoughts of anyone, anywhere. If that sounds like the setup for an extended skit, with social commentary, you're not far wrong. But the whole thing comes together in a surprising, and rewarding, way. Click through for details (and spoilers.) More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=377981&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Vernor Vinge's Forgotten Novel About Scifi Publishers on Another Planet]]> Although it's easy to love scifi author Vernor Vinge for his most lauded work, like Rainbows End or Fire Upon the Deep, some of his lesser-known novels are more memorable than the great ones. Such is the case with Tatja Grimm's World, a collection of two novellas Vinge published in the late 1960s, coupled with a mid-1980s short story about the same character. That character is Tatja Grimm, a woman on late-medieval world who mysteriously begins to manifest super-intelligence, super-strength — and a super-ability to edit science fiction manuscripts. That last bit is what makes the novel sheer, strange genius, as well as a fascinating glimpse at the creative coming-of-age of one of today's greatest SF writers. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=375906&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Virtual Worlds as Test Tube Societies]]> Though you may never visit Second Life, you know about it for the same reason you know about MySpace: it's a digital social space that's transforming how we use the web. Except instead of being a bunch of webpages devoted to bad music and OMG WTF, Second Life is a 3D virtual world where people build crazy houses, transform into dragons, and talk a lot about the Metaverse in scary marketing terms. It's something you need to understand, and luckily there's a new book that can explain it all to you. Second Life "embedded journalist" Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life hit bookstores last month, and it's one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive books out there on the topic. (That's Au above, in his Second Life incarnation.) More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=375352&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Sociopath Saves Humanity In "Five Thrillers"]]> The stand-out piece in the current Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is clearly "Five Thrillers," a novelet by Robert Reed about an antisocial maniac who takes on genetically modified insurgents. "Thrillers" starts small and crazy, and the story of Joseph Carroway's life gets bigger and crazier, until you think it can't possibly go any further — and then it does. Click through details, including non-fatal spoilers. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=365546&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Become Superhuman, Japanese-Style]]> In Japanese, the word urawaza means "secret tricks," like knowing that Superman is vulnerable to kryptonite or that certain moves will lead you to the song at the end of the game Portal. Now io9's Lisa Katayama has a whole book of Japanese tricks to turn your everyday life into science fiction, just like in William Gibson novels. The book is called Urawaza, and aside from some practical stuff like how to keep your elbows clean, it also contains obscure Japanese wisdom on a few superpowers. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=367132&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[When Computers Become Gods]]> Ever since the 1950s, when business environments were slowly being populated by giant, mainframe computers and their minicomputer progeny (which were not so mini in size), science fiction writers have toyed with the idea that computers are about to become gods. You see this in David Gerrold's 1970s novel When HARLIE Was One, as well as in the Terminator franchise, where a computer unleashes Armageddon. But if you trace this theme back, there remains one classic of the computer-as-god genre, and it's a 1950s short story by Isaac Asimov that's available for free online. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=366109&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life]]> Click to viewSpring equinox will be here in just a few weeks, and there's no better way to get ready for the seasonal change than to dig into some great science fiction books. io9 wants to help you get in the mood for transformation by offering this list of twenty science fiction novels that could change the way you see the world, and maybe even change your life. Whether it's because they've altered the course of science fiction writing, or simply provide a genuinely alien perspective on ordinary life, these are novels that will rearrange how you think. Check out our list below. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=361597&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker's Wildest Ride Yet]]> It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Singularity happens in Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular, since the title gives that development away. But what happens after the Singularity will surprise you. People usually define the Singularity as the moment when artificial intelligences improve themselves to the point where they surpass us, but Rucker's singularity takes many more forms, and is much more confounding, than that. Here are the ten things that will surprise you about Postsingular. It's all spoilers from here on out! More »
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