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What was the first message sent across the first version of email (and what was it supposed to be)? Who was the first reigning monarch online? These questions and more are answered in A People's History Of The Internet. More »
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If you're looking for some seriously mind-blowing hard science fiction online this afternoon, look no further than a new (free online) short story, "Engineers' Dreams," by science historian George Dyson. Brother of techbiz genius Esther Dyson, George is known for his meticulous, entertaining historical investigations into secret government science projects of the twentieth century. Now he's turned his eyes to the twenty-first century, and has written a highly-informed and brainy tale of how Google could become the first true artificial intelligence. Read an excerpt below. More »
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Act 2 of Joss "Firefly" Whedon's online supervillain musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog arrived on the innerwebs yesterday, and it was a great moment in evil. We get a lot more mugging from Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), as he begins dating Penny, the love of Dr. Horrible's life. In this clip, Hammer drops by the laundromat where Horrible and Penny hang out — and engages in some pretty awesome smack-talking. Including possibly the best penis joke ever. More »
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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 »
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Reality television, consumed with liberal doses of MySpace and Facebook, will make friendships of the future far more promiscuous. So says a newly-released study about people who invest a lot of time in creating profiles of themselves online (which is increasingly all of us). The authors of the study have discovered an intriguing trend in the way people are re-define "friendship" after hanging out a lot online. The good news is that current trends all point to more casual sex for people who "friend" each other online. More »
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Late last year, a terrorist attack took down the U.S. power grid for two weeks. What happened next is up to you: at least, it is if you are participating in JC Hutchins' new experiment in science fiction podcasting. The author of mega-hit SF podcast 7th Son (soon to be published as a book from St. Martins) has just launched a new project called Obsidian about this alternate-history terrorist blackout. Already, audio and video files like this one are rolling in from fans who want to expand the apocalyptic world Hutchins developed in 7th Son. More »
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Science fiction writer Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker has just posted issue #5 of his speculative fiction webzine FLURB, which is always full of bizarro delights. In this issue, Terry Bisson writes about a superhero called Captain Ordinary who teleports around the world via hidden portals in Starbucks outlets, triggered if you order the right kind of soy latte. John Shirley gives us a tasty excerpt from his dark new cyberpunk novel Black Glass Samples, and Nathaniel Hellerstein takes on the persona of the entire Web to humbly request that people stop accusing it of trying to end the world. Plus, there's a lot more, including a new story from Rucker and plenty of Rucker's art too. [FLURB] More »
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In a war-ravaged future where most urban areas are riddled with mines, a de-miner's only friends are New York street kids and his bomb dog Uxo (short for unexploded ordnance). In the short story "Uxo, Bomb Dog," available from excellent scifi blog Futurismic, author Eliot Fintushel creates a wry, sad portrait of a man who has devoted his lonely life to de-mining open spaces so people can walk freely in parks again. Eventually, the government sends him a human partner and the two of them turn their de-mining into a kind of strange comedy act, attracting locals to watch them de-mine fields while dispensing Smokey the Bear-style wisdom about how to avoid getting your face blown off while walking across Central Park ("Use your pate! Circumnavigate!") Yes, it's today's lunchtime reading. More »
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We hope that upcoming MMOThe Day manages to look like its sumptuous concept art, pictured above. That image of the Arc de Triomphe being repaired, upgraded, or duplicated is just simply amazing. The premise of The Day is that two parallel worlds smash together, and we've got a whole gallery of strange history-mashup imagery from The Day for you to gawk at. More »
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