io9: Books

More Terrifying Than Space is Space Madness

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:08:14 PDT

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a biweekly column where we explore the intersection of scifi and horror. If there's one thing more terrible than having a zombie eat the tongue out of your head by breaking your jaw, it's imagining that zombies are eating you when they aren't. That's why one of the best veins to mine in scifi-horror is madness. What makes insanity worse in many ways than giant drooling monsters is that you can't kill the monsters in your head with ice or swords or cold viruses. You want to escape the horror of your own crazy? You've got to drill your own brain out, like the protagonist does in Pi. And that, my friends, is what makes scifi-tinged madness so tragic as well as frightening: there's no way to set things right. Without further ado, let's take a dark psychological tour of most horrifying examples of space madness.

Obviously, not all scifi madness is space madness, but there are some great examples of this classic form of mental degeneration coming from being cooped up in a tiny place that is your only life support. Sometimes you're cooped up with a bunch of annoying people, like in the Michael Crichton book/movie Sphere, where the space madness is actually "undersea madness" but it's the basic idea. You're in a tiny, stinky space and you want badly to leave, but if you do you die. In Sphere, as in many "space madness" classics (including the best Ren & Stimpy episode ever). One of the basic signs of space madness is rampant hallucination, usually enhanced into something real by alien technologies. This also the case in the original Russian version of Solaris, where a mad spaceman starts seeing freaky visions of his mother and lots of macrame because the planet he's circling has some kind of power to manifest the unconscious.

You see a strange and gooey-disturbing variation on the theme of space madness in Donnie Darko, a cult film that may be slightly incoherent but wins the awesome award anyway for successfully depicting a genuinely scary cute bunny costume. In this film, which has about a billion interpretations, one thing is clear: our antihero Donnie has a potentially-fatal encounter with a jet engine that crashes into his bedroom. And then time goes out of joint, or maybe his imagination does, and he begins to have visions of an evil cute bunny and car crashes and a sky filling up with clouds like dark ink. Space doesn't drive teenager Donnie mad, his family does. And his suburban house is sort of like a spaceship in that he's still too young to leave home and survive. So he's stuck there, until his world is punctured by a giant piece of jet junk. Are his visions real? Can he change the future? You'll be creeped out by these questions and his mental anguish until the very last scene.

The novel and movie Mysterious Skin turn childhood trauma into space madness. It's the story of two boys who grew up together in Kansas, barely knowing one another, but connected by an incident that one of them is convinced was an alien abduction. The movie, an indie directed by Gregg Araki with Joseph Gordon Leavitt, is terrific — but the novel by Scott Heim is simply gorgeous and haunting and full of midwestern teen angst turned trippy. While one character pursues his theory that he was abducted by aliens, the other pursues gay hustling and moves to the alien city of New York. It's to Heim's credit that you don't know until the very end whether the aliens are real.

As I said in reference to Sphere and Solaris, one of the hallmarks of space madness is that your mad fantasies become real. That's certainly the case with one of the most tragic and beloved crazy creatures in science fiction: The Hulk. I'm not the first person to point out that Bruce Banner is basically a mutant with multiple personality disorder, whose dark alternate self has the unfortunate ability to embody what would in an ordinary person be merely a delusion of grandeur. Like Mr. Hyde before him, Hulk is the literal representation of repressed rage. Like madness itself, which can sometimes be contained but often never completely cured, Hulk is always returning from whatever prison the military, the shrinks, or the Avengers cook up for him.

Of course, there is one perfect way to defeat madness — perhaps as perfect as the cold virus was at defeating the tripods in War of the Worlds. Simply destroy the brain that spawns the madness. Hence the amazing brain-drilling scene in Pi, which allows our hero to escape his own mind — and escape the evil corporation that wants to exploit his mind. This idea also feeds into the utterly depressing scene at the end of Brazil where our romantic hero Sam Lowry has been tortured to the point of complete catatonia. I suppose in Brazil his madness may in fact be his salvation. Depends on how you read it.

There are dozens of other books and movies that deal with space madness writ small or large: Jacob's Ladder, Perdido Street Station, Dark City, and Octavia Butler's superlative Patternmaster series. While some of these stories imagine that you can get over "the crazy," as it's called in the TV-signal-makes-you-smash-heads movie The Signal, most of them don't. Either the characters die, or remain alive in a state of horrifying out-of-controlness like Hulk or some of the creatures whose minds have been eaten in China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station. So, like I said, things could be a lot worse than having your brain eaten by zombies. You could have zombies in your brain. Forever.

Brace Yourself For Cancer-Horror And The Lost Cyberpunk Novel

Charlie Jane Anders — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:09:59 PDT

Cyberpunk guru John Shirley could be spawning three movies soon: the Weinstein Company is doing a movie of his novel Demons, in which corporations deliberately cause cancer as part of a program of human sacrifice, with Jim Sonzero (Pulse) attached to direct. "Wish I wrote the script, but some "A" scripter got the job," Shirley tells io9. Plus his forthcoming novel Bleak History, an urban fantasy set in a near-future New York, has been optioned by New Regency Productions (Mr. And Mrs. Smith). And his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story Ligeia is in post-production. If that wasn't enough, he has three new books in the works, including the "lost cyberpunk novel."

That lost cyberpunk novel would be Black Glass, coming out in August from ESP Books. Says Shirley:

Black Glass, which will be published in its first, hardcover edition, this summer, by Elder Signs Press, was conceived under a different name and as a different kind of project, in the early days of cyberpunk, by myself and William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Spook Country and all his books in between. We had collaborated on a couple of projects before this one. I don't remember who came up with the main idea or the general story of Black Glass. I know I wrote up an elaborate tale based on our discussion; I'm the one who fleshed it out and Bill approved it. But then the project got derailed, we both got diverted, and Bill was swept off to collect awards, count his royalties, chill with rock stars, and work on other projects. Subsequently, long subsequently, I remembered the book and inquired; Bill is a busy guy and turned the whole thing over to me.

So some years later I have written the novel, which I think of as the Lost Cyberpunk Novel; I have written it in its entirety. No one else should be held to blame.

You can read some excerpts here. Also, he's working on a new collection, In Extremis, The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley. (Presumably this will be weirder than his collection Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories.) And then there's the aforementioned Bleak History, coming late this year from Simon and Schuster.

Image from cover of Dark Wisdom #8, featuring Shirley's writing.

Environmental Fascists Fight Gun-Loving Lesbians for Alien Technology

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:07:39 PDT

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.

Bear, whose books come out so quickly that you'll blink and miss one, is famous for combining high-octane military/spy tales with eccentric and subversive subplots. In last year's Undertow a traditional actioner turns out to hinge on the politics of mining practices. And in her recently-released Dust, a battle for power on board a ship that's traveled for generations is full of little kinks that make her characters stand out as intensely realistic in unrealistic surroundings.

But back to Carnival, a novel where all the traditional ideas of liberal science fiction like matriarchies and ecotopias are turned on their heads. When lesbians rule a planet, they don't create peace and harmony: they become obsessed with guns and honor and dueling. They enslave all men (except homosexuals, whom they call "gentles"), using them to breed and for labor. And they engage in brutal guerilla warfare to gain power in government.

The novel's back story, though dealt with only cursorily (which is too bad), is even more interesting. A group of radical eco-liberationists create these super-powered AIs designed to reduce Earth's carbon footprint no matter what it takes. So the AIs proceed to kill the entire human population of the Northern Hemisphere, getting rid of all the white people they can. They continue to do regular "assessments" of the human population, killing anyone who takes too much energy without giving back to the society in some significant way. All breeding and energy consumption are strictly controlled. Everyone must be a vegan or die. To escape, humans begin populating other planets where they can use more energy without getting "assessed."

Meanwhile, the human population becomes more conservative, outlawing homosexuality because everyone has become so obsessed with a desire to breed in the face of massive birth control programs. Anyone who challenges the idea of reproductive sex becomes, ironically, suspect. Bear's idea that an eco-regime like this would breed conservatism rather than progressivism is really quite smart, and world-building junkies like me will love her careful attention to how ideologies might evolve over time.

And for those who could give a crap about world-building, well you're in luck too. Most of the narrative is about Vincent and Michelangelo, two super-spies on Amazonia posing as diplomats. They're lovers, which makes them outcasts in their own culture but ideal for this mission since the only males the Amazonians tolerate are gay ones.

As they get embroiled in local politics and factions, as well as meeting the AI ghosts of the aliens who occupied Amazonia before — leaving their energy-generators behind — the plot thickens and there are some genuinely cool spy vs. counter-spy vs. counter-counter-spy moments. Some of the Amazonians want to help the spies because they want to keep Amazonia free of the eco-facists, and others want to help bring in the eco-fascists in order to liberate the enslaved men. Plus, there's pistol dueling.

Unfortunately, sometimes the spy stuff gets so thick that it veers into being incoherent, especially since Vincent and Michelangelo are doing missions they have to keep secret from each other. There are actually passages where you can't figure out who is spying on whom, and that can be a problem when you've already got a lot of confusing alien stuff happening too.

But what pleases about this novel, and the reason I'd recommend it as a good way to get into one of the most prolific and exciting science fiction writers working today, is that it manages to do what so few SF novels can. That is, it offers an intriguing, intellectually-rewarding glimpse at one human possible future while also telling a rip-roaring yarn. No, it's not terribly realistic. Most of Bear's other books have a strong dose of fantasy, and you can tell she's used to explaining tech via magic rather than hard science. But as a thought-experiment, Carnival is a great success, and a good rejoinder to the greenies in these eco-obsessed times.

Carnival [Amazon]

Tremble and Cry Out -- These Orgasm Weapons Are Unstoppable

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:05:26 PDT

What is the most devious and unstoppable weapon throughout space and time? No, it's not the Doomsday Device or Death Star — it's a weapon that delivers orgasms. Whether they mind-control you with lust or cripple you with knee-buckling climaxes, the orgasm-inducing weapon of the future will be powerful indeed. We've already told you about scifi aphrodisiacs that come from rays and parasites, and now it's time to count the ways you can weaponize aphrodisiacs and begin the orgasm onslaught.

Here are five orgasm weapons you'll want to stick in your holster.

The orgasm gun from Orgazmo delivers orgasm from a distance via a cheesy "raygun" special effect and can be used to stop bad guys (or give unsuspecting girls a zap). Orgazmo, made by South Park guys Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is a scifi comedy about Mormons, pornography, and this strange device. Can a nice Mormon boy who accidentally becomes a porn star save the world with his orgasm gun? You'll have to rent this flick to find out.

In Larry Niven's "known space" books, he introduces the Tasp — a weapon that delivers intense zaps of pleasure right to your brain. It can be used to incapacitate enemies, who are left writhing on the ground in ecstasy. Or it can be used to slowly train somebody you want to enslave, by giving them pleasurable rewards each time they obey you. Eventually, they'll get addicted to your Tasp and do anything to get another jolt. This is a major plot point in Niven's Ringworld, where the Puppeteer alien has a Tasp installed in one of his heads and uses it to control the other creatures who venture to the Dyson Ring with him.

Ming's ring in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie seems to have some kind of orgasm-inducing, mind-controlling power. As you can see in this video we posted of Ming controlling Dale with the ring, falling under its glowing ray results in writhing and solo dirty dancing moves. Could be good at parties. Or in the throne rooms of Emperors who make speeches about "pathetic Earthlings." Either way.

And although sex ninjas aren't exactly scifi, there is simply no cause to leave out the importance of orgasm weapons in the anime miniseries La Blue Girl. It's the simple tale of rival ninja clans who fight with sex instead of swords. The first person to have an orgasm loses, and often becomes enslaved to the ninja who gives the orgasm. Plus monsters can play too, which makes it even harder to resist those orgasms. After all, a monster can have an infinite number of pleasure-inducing tentacles as you can see here.

There's a really messed-up orgasm electrode in Robin Cook's cheesy medical thriller Brain, about some scurrilous doctors who create a brain-based computer by using the brains of hapless co-eds. In one scene, our hero finds out about the brain experiments, and discovers the secret of using women's brains. The bad guys have their unlucky vicitms half-dissected but still alive, suspended in cerebro-spinal fluid, their brains exposed and their bodies (inexplicably) still attached. (Also, unexplained is why they need only ladies, other than that it's way sexier.) They've implanted electrodes in the women's pleasure centers to get them to perform computer work in their heads. "When we stimulate her, she has the sensation of 100 orgasms," the evil doctor tells our hero. "It must be sensational because she wants it constantly." I love that this doctor knows exactly what 100 orgasms would feel like, as if "orgasm" is a unit of pleasure measurement.

And just to remind you that the reality of these devices is closer than you might think, don't forget that surgeon Stuart Meloy invented a spinal implant several years ago that gives women orgasms. He's patented it, and is in the process of doing tests to turn it into a consumer device.

Are Adults More Ignored Than Children In SF Lit?

Graeme McMillan — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:30:00 PDT

They've published books, linked to and even interviewed each other, but now authors Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi are collectively wondering whether anyone is paying attention to their most recent books, and just what is the most under-appreciated genre of literature: Young Adult or Regular Science Fiction?

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

But that's okay, he decides, because it's kind of cool that no-one is paying attention to the YA section:

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

Scalzi, however, disagrees. Not that there's a lot of awesome stuff happening in YA SF, but that no-one's paying attention:

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

It's interesting that YA SF is great because you get to do a lot of cool stuff because it seems as if no-one's paying attention, and yet more people are paying attention to YA SF than "grown-up" SF.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]

There Is Joy In Mudville: Mighty Casey Has Been Cloned

Charlie Jane Anders — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:13:00 PDT

Could there be an unlikelier science fiction author than former baseball star (and confessed steroid user) Jose Canseco? Maybe, but we can't think of one right now. Canseco, who just put out a sequel to his bestelling steroid memoir Juiced, says his next project will be a "very dark dark scifi story."

Says Canseco: "I'm working on a third book, which will be fiction... It's going to be about baseball and cloning." I'm picturing an aging ball player replaced by his younger, hungrier clone? Or a whole team of clones?

I hope he gets an awesome ghost writer, someone who understands the long history of baseball in science fiction. And Barry (The Natural) Levinson can direct the inevitable movie version. [LAist, via Lion In Oil]

Stephan Martiniere: The Future Will Be Bio-Mechanical

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:00:00 PDT

Welcome to The Jewels of Aptor, a biweekly column about the intersection of art and the fantastic. Never heard of French artist Stephan Martiniere? Well, you've definitely heard of the projects he's been involved with: Star Wars II and III, The Astronaut's Wife, Red Planet, I, Robot, Virus, and several other SF movies. That's in addition to creative work on videogames, animated projects, TV, and book covers. Even better, he's helped design theme parks like Fantastik Pukoland in Japan (and check out the TVLand theme park production paintings in the gallery below). His credits might be glitzy, but we love Martiniere's art because of its organic feel, the sense of the future being as much biological as mechanical—a trait he shares with French genius Moebius.

He also evokes classic SF themes in an updated context, the best example being his sketch for a Star Wars droid that bears more than a passing resemblance to the alien machines in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

But, in SF terms, that's not the only reason Martiniere has been so successful. Lou Anders, editorial director for Pyr, has used Martiniere for more than a dozen covers, including spectacular novels by Kay Kenyon and Ian MacDonald (the former cover a Chelsey Award winner). He keeps using Martiniere because he believes the artist, more than any other currently working, "seems to take that abstract and elusive 'sens-a-wunder' that is always being touted as the hallmark quality of science fiction's Golden Age and distill its essence into imagery that speaks directly to that sense of cosmic scope and scale...Stephan takes that breathless moment that we all remember from our teens, the first time we encountered the notions of and behind Ringworld or Rama or Dune, when one literally has to put the book one is reading down and come up for air—and he freezes that moment in time."

Anders also notes another element we love about Martiniere's work, that it "owes nothing to the grosser and more lurid pulp excesses, yet always celebrates and never rejects its genre heart." Pulp influences are great, but Martiniere's art seems to indicate you can be moved to excellence as much from the art in great SF and fantasy movies as by past traditions in book cover art.

Indeed, in addition to classical art and illustration masters, Martiniere cites the influence of movies such as 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, and Dark Crystal. Martiniere's skill at composition and his understanding of mise en scene definitely reflect that influence. Almost all of his paintings, composed digitally, have that quality of the best screen stills—capturing a perfectly framed moment. And, in his excellent work for video games like Myst and Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, Martiniere has mastered use of space, creating haunting images and situations that require restraint and a subtle touch. This subtlety is reflected in the grotesque delicacy of such recent work as the Neemaster and Creature paintings in the gallery below.

Who knows what Martiniere will turn his hand to next, but we think you can be sure that it'll be of intense interest to fans of fine art and science fiction alike.

Stephan Martiniere [Artist's Site]

Tom Holt Explains Why Do-Gooder Time Travelers Muck Things Up

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:27:47 PDT

Scifi satirist Tom Holt, author of several weird books, has just written up a short article explaining why it would be a bad idea to save the world if you were to travel in time. Specifically, he points out that if you were to try to stop the Black Death from ravaging Europe, you would save Feudalism and screw the future forever. See, why don't the people in the Terminator franchise ever think about that? By destroying Skynet, they're probably preserving some crappy thing that will bite us all in the ass in 500 years. [Orbit]

On the International Space Station, You Can Watch Star Wars But Not Star Trek

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:20:00 PDT

In a stroke of weird genius, the people at GovernmentAttic.org issued a FOIA (freedom of information act) request to the US government to reveal the contents of the multimedia library on the International Space Station. Probably happy that they weren't being asked about the Patriot Act, the government happily complied, supplying us with a 13-page document containing the titles of every book, movie, and TV show in the ISS library. Not surprisingly there's a lot of science fiction in the mix, plus (of course) The Right Stuff. But there are some shocking choices in terms of what got put in — and what got left out.

Imagine if you will that you are on the ISS for a tour of duty. You can only bring a few things with you, so you're relying on the ISS library to keep you entertained. And you arrive only to discover there is ABSOLUTELY NO STAR TREK. That's right: you can watch every single Star Wars movie, every single Matrix movie (including Animatrix), every Lost episode, all the X-Men, tons of Stargate episodes, and even The Princess Bride (yay!). But no Star Trek movies. No Star Trek TV shows. WHAT THE HELL, people? Why does the government hate Star Trek?!

I really couldn't tell you, but I can tell you that the book selections are a little less mind-boggling. There's a heaping dose of Analog and Asimov's SF magazines, the Foundation books from Asimov, some Greg Bear, some Kim Stanley Robinson, lots of Jules Verne, and an incredibly large amount of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels. (Somebody at NASA must be a fan.) There's also an inexplicably large number of the Xanth books by Piers Anthony, in case you need to jumpstart your 13-year-old humor glands while in orbit.

But I'm still reeling over the Trek miscalculation. What is happening to the U.S. government? And by extension, to the INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY on board the ISS? Really, I am in shock. I hope the guys over at TrekMovie can explain this because I can't. (Thanks, David!)

Check out the full list of goodies you can read and watch on the ISS, via GovernmentAttic. [PDF]

Do We Need Graphic Torture in Our Dystopias?

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:43:30 PDT

Welcome back to Horrorhead, a column all about the connections between horror and scifi. On Battlestar Galactica, there's an ongoing theme of torture: humans gang-rape an imprisoned Cylon; the Cylons beat a man so badly he loses his eye (not to mention all the humans they kill outright); and there's even a little human-on-Cylon washboarding early in the series. These are not scenes that take place entirely offscreen. We see beatings; we see the bloody, freaked-out face of Six the Cylon after she's been raped so many times she can't stand up and has lost the will to eat. The question is, do we need to see these scenes? Would this series be as powerful without them? And by extension, would any torture-laced scifi flick like The Hills Have Eyes or Cube be as enticing if it lost the mutilations or the razor net that falls from the ceiling and reduces living humans to little cubes of flesh? (Spoilers ahead.)

The answer is obviously complicated. For some people, torture puts any story beyond the pale: a couple of weeks ago, scifi writer Karen Joy Fowler told me in an interview that she refuses to watch Battlestar Galactica because there's too much torture in it. But millions of movie fans have turned near-future flick Hostel, about an imaginary Eastern European country that houses a torture-entertainment center for the rich, into a cult hit and franchise. And the TV series 24, which is also a near-future dystopia, also has millions of drooling fans who don't seem to mind that superspy Jack, our main character, is constantly torturing people with everything from ugly lamps to fists.

Enough has been said about torture porn that I don't need to repeat the arguments too much here. They all boil down to one question: Does watching torture make us more likely to tolerate it in real life?

I had a brilliant professor in college who always answered that question with a roll of her eyes. "Look," she would say, "If it were true that we always did what the media told us, then every single advertisement would work. We'd buy everything we see advertised." Because she's right about that, we know it's not the case that everything we see in the media leads to behaviors in real life. The question of torture then boils down to whether it's necessary for a given story.

Let's look at one of the most famous examples of torture in scifi. Canadian flick Cube, which came out in the late 1990s, was your classic, Saw-style "a bunch of strangers trapped in a weird place have to solve puzzles to escape horrible grody death" kind of flick. For people raised with videogames, a form of entertainment where you solve puzzles to avoid dying, the scenario was familiar. And the puzzle was even pretty cool: the characters have to figure out a sequence of prime numbers in order to escape from a giant cube building full of rooms that move around all the time. As they're figuring out the prime number sequence, they venture into rooms that stab them, poison them, chop them up into little cubes, and generally spew gore everywhere. Do we need the torture along with the cool math game? I'd say yes. The entire movie depends on the audience understanding the characters' urgency, but at the same time the scenario is surreal enough that bringing in the torture enhances our sense of bizarre otherworldliness.

But how about Wes "Scream" Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a classic cult movie from the 1970s that was just remade into a less-than-amazing franchise? In the original, gritty-freakout movie, a family whose truck breaks down is waylaid by atomic cannibal mutants in the desert. The torture is campy and hideous at the same time. In fact, the entire point of the movie is really the torture, and the escape, of our normal American family. Like Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes is literally about torture and what it can do to you. So the movie couldn't exist without torture, and in fact the torture itself is the point. How will people be dismembered? Where will the blood splatter? Will they really DO that? Without torture, there would be no movie.

Let's return to Battlestar Galactica's torture with these two examples in mind. Unlike The Hills Have Eyes, BSG is not about torture. It's about a horrific dystopia where torture has become part of everyday life. Like Cube, BSG uses torture to explore the urgency of the situation its characters are in. So do we need the torture to feel that urgency?

One might ask the same question about a scene in Iain M. Banks' novel The Algebraist, where we are treated to an intense scene of torture in order to show how evil one particular character, Luseferous, really is:

[Luseferous] had decreed that the final punishment of the assassin should be his own teeth . . . Accordingly, his four canine teeth had been removed, bioengineered to become tusks which would grow without ceasing . . . These great finger-thick fangs had erupted out of the bones of his upper and lower jaw, puncturing the flesh of his lips, and had continued their remorseless growth. The lower set curved up and over his head, and after a few months worth of extension, came to touch his scalp near the top of his head, while the upper set grew in a scimitar-like paired sweep beneath his neck . . . Both sets of teeth then started to enter the assassin's body, one pair slowly forcing themselves through the bony plates of the man's skull, the other entering rather more easily into the soft tissues of the lower neck . . . The fangs burrowing through his skull and into his brain were the ones which would shortly, and agonizingly, kill him . . . This unfortunate, nameless assassin had been unable to do anything to prevent this because he was pinned helpless and immobile against the wall of the chamber . . . his nutrition and bodily functions catered for by various tubes and implants . . . The fellow's ears and mind still worked.

Could we have learned that Luserferous was a twisted person, as well as a dictator, without that passage? Did it need to be so detailed and creative?

Perhaps it could have been less detailed, but I would not have remembered it so vividly if it had not. Similarly, I would not have felt the horror of the humans' and Cylons' situations without seeing Six tortured by humans, and Baltar tortured by Cylons. I am not sure if making something memorable is justification, but it is certainly emotional realism. And in a genre whose entire narrative substance is the unreal, the science fictional, a dose of emotional realism can be potent indeed.

Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi Are Doing It for the Kids

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:20:33 PDT

Scifi authors Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi both have books coming out (Little Brothers and Zoe's War respectively) that are aimed at young adults. It's great to see two smartypants writers aiming their often-subversive messages at the next generation. Now they've just done a great mutual interview about their new books, plus a little digression into lighting things on fire and putting bacon on cats. You can see the video on YouTube via BoingBoing.

20 Science Books Every Scifi Fan (and Writer) Should Read

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:32:06 PDT

You 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.

Some of these books are well-known, and you will no doubt have heard of them. Others made it onto the list for exploring scientific discoveries that are less well-known but are nevertheless inspiring and mind-blowing.

I've listed them in chronological order, not in order of importance.

On the Origin of Species (1859), by Charles Darwin.
This is the book where Darwin first explained to the general public the theory of natural selection, in which species compete with each other for survival in specific environments. It remains an incredibly influential scientific treatise to this day.

Male and Female (1949), by Margaret Mead.
Mead was a celebrated anthropologist whose book Coming of Age in Samoa, based on years of research into tribal society, took the world by storm. While many of the observations she made in that book have been questioned in years since, her book Male and Female has endured the test of time. In it, she turned her anthropologist's eye to mating rituals and family networks in the United States, revealing to readers how strange their practices actually were. In particular, she made a gentle but persistent argument that perhaps we ought to question our gender roles and be less rigid about sexual relationships. Funny and well-written, the book was one of the first to use the tools of anthropology on the anthropologist's own society.

Animal Liberation (1975), by Peter Singer.
Singer is one of the most famous science ethicists in the world, and he made his first mark with this book. In it, he took the first of many radical positions about humans' place on Earth, and whether we are truly worth more than animals. He argued that an ethical society must treat animals compassionately, since they have the ability to suffer.

Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), by Douglas Hofstadter.
A book about math, meaning, complex symbols, and music, this tour-de-force is a beautifully-written classic of the science writing genre. Its intertwined tales of three influential thinkers - logician Godel, artist Escher, and composer Bach - is reminiscient of the scifi novels of Neal Stephenson.

Cosmos (1985), by Carl Sagan. The classic introduction to astrophysics, by one of the most accessible writers on the topic. Sagan was an astrophysicist himself, who worked tirelessly to secure funding for space exploration and inspire humans to search for their counterparts elsewhere in the universe.

The Selfish Gene (1990), by Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins is now primarily known as an atheist advocate, but his first big public splash came with this book, which argued that the basis for reproduction was the selfish urge to pass one's genes on. His analysis also included the urge to spread memes, or units of meaning, making the book a rather all-encompassing indictment of humans as selfish from the tiniest biological level to the broadest social one.

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1995), by Laurie Garrett.
This controversial look at the spread of diseases and pandemics in a world riddled with poverty and health care deficits is both fascinating and required reading for anybody interested in zombies or plague.

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher (1995), by Richard P. Feynman.
The "easiest" (i.e., most accessible to people without degrees in the physical sciences) lectures from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. These are six lectures excerpted from his famous book Lectures on Physics, originally published in 1963. Learn about everything from atoms to quantum force.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999), by Jared Diamond.
As influential as Dawkins' Selfish Gene, Diamond's book of evolutionary anthropology looks at why some civilizations succeeded in conquering vast parts of the globe while others died out or where conquered. Compassionate and interesting, Diamond's writing is persuasive and will change the way you look at civilization forever.

The Elegant Universe (2000), by Brian Greene.
All the freakiest new physics shit, explained clearly and with good humor, in one simple book.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (2000), by Simon Singh.
A fascinating story of how different civilizations through time used math, science, and later computers to communicate across great distances, even through enemy territory, without letting their secrets out. Packed with cool information about code-cracking, ciphers, and even quantum cryptography, this is a must-read for anybody who wants to write about futuristic spies.

The Well: A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (2001), by Katie Hafner.
There are dozens of good histories of the early internet out there, but none captures the human stories behind it as well as New York Times reporter Hafner's account of one of the first online community, The Well. In many ways, The Well was doing what Facebook and MySpace later did, only in the 1980s. Technically interesting and full of gripping human drama, Hafner's book is a forgotten classic.

The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (2002), by David Barash and Judith Lipton.
Written by a psychologist and a zoologist, this is one of the most revolutionary science books to deal with mating behaviors. The authors lay out a careful, evidence-packed argument that monogamy is incredibly rare in the animal kingdom and that the human desire to cling to it as a norm may not have any basis in biological realities. Plus there are a ton of great stories about birds cheating on each other.

A User's Guide to the Brain (2002), by John Ratey.
Harvard neuroscientist Ratey uses lots of intriguing examples from everyday life to explain the complicated neurological mechanisms that allow you to do things like pay attention and access memories.

How the Universe Got Its Spots (2002), by Janna Levin.
Levin is a physicist who studies the origins of the universe, and is also a writer whose language is both clear and poetic. Something about cosmology invites poetic meditations, and Levin manages to combine somewhat melancholy explorations of her own place in the universe with complicated physics formulas to create one of the most interesting books you'll ever read.

Why Things Break (2003), by Mark Eberhart.
This isn't about how things break, but WHY things break. What is it about certain physical materials that causes them to crack, crumble, or collapse? Written by materials scientist Eberhart in an accessible, geekish-love-of-chemistry tone, this is perhaps the best introduction you'll ever get to the science that can answer the question of why bridges collapse and gaskets blow.

Evolution's Rainbow: Why Darwin Was Wrong About Sexual Selection (2004), by Joan Roughgarden.
Written as a sharp, highly-articulate rejoinder to people like Dawkins who believe that creatures reproduce for selfish reasons, Stanford evolutionary biologist Roughgarden proves that animals and people often collaborate in the process of reproduction for altruistic reasons. In the process, she answers the question of why so many animals regularly evolve homosexuality, a non-reproductive form of mating. She argues persuasively that non-reproducing animals are necessary to evolution.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising (2005), by Daniel H. Wilson.
Funny and bizarre, Wilson's book is a perfect blend of science writing and science fiction speculation — it's as if he's written a robotics guide for science fiction fans who want to know what could really, plausibly happen if robots were to revolt. Plus, there are a lot of tips for avoiding being killed by robots, which is always helpful.

Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law (2005), by Kerry MacIntosh.
MacIntosh is a law professor who has become profoundly interested in how current human rights law will affect human clones when they are born. She's done meticulous research on the topic, and demonstrated that in fact human clones will have no legal rights because they are "illegal beings." Given that so many researchers outside the U.S. are openly developing human reproductive cloning, this legal issue is likely to become serious over the next couple of decades. MacIntosh is the only person to have written about this from a purely legal point of view, and her findings are riveting.

The Science of Orgasm (2006), by Barry Komisauruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple.
One of the most coveted and talked-about forms of human pleasure, the orgasm has nevertheless suffered from a paucity of scientific study. At last, Rutgers researchers have tackled this elusive experience and written a terrific book about what actually happens to you — neurologically and chemically — when you have an orgasm. And there are even suggestions for how "orgasm chemicals" might be used in future painkillers. Nobody interested in the science of human experience should miss this book.

A Crash Course in Alternate History Novels

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:26:20 PDT

So you've snapped up Michael Chabon's Nebula Award winning novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and now you want more thoughtful alternate histories to fill your brain and bookshelf. While there are literally hundreds of alternate histories out there (many of them written by various Michael Moorcocks and Harry Turtledoves in different timelines), a few standouts will help you get into the genre and lead you down the happy path to historical mindfuckery. Check out our our suggestions for some brilliant alternate history reading.

A classic of the genre is Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, an early-1960s novel about what happens to the United States after Japan and Germany win World War II. The West Coast has gone Japanese, while the South is full of Germans and the Midwest is still its own independent country. Meanwhile, a mysterious "man in the high castle" has written a book about an alternate United States which won World War II. Dick's mind-bending and tragic novel inspired a whole host of "what if the Nazis won" novels, including the critically-acclaimed Fatherland. Vladimir Nabokov also picked up on the idea of an alternate history novel-within-an alternate history novel for his book Ada or Ardor, about what would have happened if the U.S. had been colonized by Czarist Russia.

Another great look at an alternate United States comes in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which is about what might have happened if Charles Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president in the early 1940s, and the country had slid into fascism.

Several British alternate histories focus on the Napoleonic Wars. Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell takes place in an alternate nineteenth century England where magic is a recognized scholarly pursuit like science. In fact, in Clark's England, one of the nation's medieval kings was a sorcerer, but the applied use of magic has fallen out of favor. The novel's two eponymous protagonists become the first practitioners of magic in England for two centuries, and aid the government in the war. Naomi Novik's popular series beginning with His Majesty's Dragon posits a Napoleonic War fought in part with dragons.

Jacqueline Carey's mammoth Kushiel series is about what would have happened to Europe if Christianity had not become the dominant religion, and instead paganism reigned. One result of this situation, at least in the region we know as France, is that prostitutes are revered like holy royalty. And in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Years of Rice and Salt, Christianity's march across Europe is halted due to the Black Plague and Islam becomes the dominant world religion instead.

Even cyberpunk has its alt.histories: The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, kicked off the steampunk craze with its tale of what would have happened if the computer had been invented in the nineteenth century.

Michael Chabon and Nancy Kress Top the List of Nebula Winners

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:44:36 PDT

Over the weekend, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America presented its annual Nebula Awards for best works of science fiction and fantasy. Held in Austin, the Nebula Award weekend is celebration of the speculative literary scene, including everyone from the most literary to the most pulpy authors around. Unlike the Hugo Awards, which are won by popular vote, the Nebulas are chosen by a committee — sort of Academy Awards style. This year, nobody was surprised when Michael Chabon's alternate history novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union took the coveted "best novel" award. More winners below, plus links to the stories for your week's lunchtime reading.

NOVELLA: "Fountain of Age", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Jul 2007)
Kress' latest collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls, is about to hit the bookstores. I'm excited to read it, and will be reviewing it here!

NOVELETTE: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Ted Chiang (F&SF Sep 2007; Subterranean Press)

SHORT STORY: "Always", Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov's Apr/May 2007)
Fowler's latest novel, Wit's End, just came out this month.

SCRIPT: Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro
This tale of a girl, a fairy kingdom, and a nation full of fascists was one of the best fantasy movies I've ever seen. Del Toro is directing Hellboy 2, and two forthcoming movies based on The Hobbit. His monsters are more sympathetic and nuanced than most human characters.

ANDRE NORTON AWARD: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (Scholastic)
Apparently Rowling has ever won a Nebula before. About time.

My favorite multiverse Marxist, Michael Moorcock, was presented the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. I hope that means he gets to wear a cloak or something. Or maybe shiny shoes? Nothing says "grand master" like shiny shoes.

(Thanks for the reminder, Saadiq!)

Nebula Winners [Locus Online]

Karen Joy Fowler Talks to io9 About Writing in the Future

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:19:48 PDT

What happens to old-fashioned storytelling when we spend all our time inventing stories about ourselves and other people online? Do stories become less magical? Does ordinary life become more science fictional? Last week I sat down with Karen Joy Fowler, author of Sarah Canary and the recently-published Wit's End, to find out what she thinks. Wit's End is about, in part, the way the internet has made all of our lives a lot more fictional. And Fowler is fine with that.

One of the characters in Fowler's new novel is a (real life) cult leader named William Riker, which is also the name of the first officer on the Next Generation-era Enterprise. When I sat down with Fowler at a local cafe, I had to blurt it out: "I thought you made Riker up as a Star Trek joke." She grinned mysteriously, replying, "Just because Riker is a real person doesn't make it not a joke. I thought there were fruitful opportunities for confusion with Riker."

I asked her about whether she considers her new book to be science fiction set in the present because all the characters are so consumed by technology, and have relationships with fictional characters online.

Fowler said:

A few months ago I thought about how I wasn't getting very much done, so I measured how much time a day I spent online. I still don't want to face what I found out. I have a routine online every day. Email takes longer than I ever anticipated. Plus there are political blogs that I visit more than once a day. I have to chceck up on my government hourly. I also do a fair amount of research online, and I keep up with my friends through their blogs too.

The internet has become such a daily part of my life that if I'm writing a kind of time capsule novel in order to accurately portray what life is like now, I have to include the net - though it's not easy, because characters surfing webs sites doesn't make for exciting fiction. I wanted to think about what [the internet] meant for my life as a public figure and a private person. As well as what it has done to our notions of public and private — that is enormously interesting to me. I have no clue how i feel about it, though I have concerns.

Stan Robinson says we all live in SF novels now. So many aspects of our lives sound as if they should be in the future but they're here right now. I suspect that a novel that takes into account the world now feels like a scifi novel.

Would Fowler consider Wit's End a scifi novel? Here's what she said:

I love genre writing, and there isn't a genre you could name where there isn't somebody working in it that I admire a great deal. But I'm a very contrary person and so rules or formula are actually very energizing and inspiring to me partly because I have no intention of following them. If I have a rule then I can break it. That helps me think about stories and where they can go.

In England, [my novel] The Jane Austen Book Club was marketed as "chick lit." How it's packaged and presented are very different from here in the U.S. It sold very well there but it had a pastelly, chick-litty cover. When I was in England a number of people told me they'd read it based on a review but they never would have picked it up based on title and cover.

Genre only troubles me in terms of representing my work because it's an inaccurate portrait of what I'm doing. If you think you're getting a piece of genre writing, there will be nothing but disappointment and betrayal for you.

I'm relieved when I don't have to answer the question about genre. It's not my job to announce who I am and what I write. People are constantly making that judgment - sometimes they think I'm scifi and some say I'm not. I don't care where you put me. But the science fiction audience has always been my loyal friends.

Given that she admits she loves genre lit, however, I couldn't stop myself from asking what kind of scifi she's watching on TV right now.

I watch Lost with my husband, which is frustrating because he always wants them to answer questions, and I say why are you watching it then? I love the flash forwards this season. When they did that flash forward that appeared to be a flashback — I thought, "How smart are these people!" I used to watch X-Files - and I began to feel like there was no there there. It was just spontaneous "bees! smallpox!" And so in the end I did not approve of the X-Files.

I'm concerned about the politics Battlestar Galactica. The show has taken this horrible turn where we watch people getting tortured. I really dislike that being part of the conversation. I don't want to see that, even if it's done to disapprove of it. It makes torture something that can be discussed. That's just so far beyond the pale. Plus the power structures are so American. There's a Secretary of Education, and a President. Why can't we imagine other political structures?

She also revealed a little bit about what her next book will be about. She's fascinated by recent psychological studies about language acquisition in chimps. "When do we decide that they actually have language?" she asked. So her next book, as she put it, will be about "psychology and chimps." Sounds like a typical Fowler genre-bending brainfest. I can't wait. Image from cover of Sarah Canary.

How to Outrun Zombies, and Other Ways to Solve Problems Japanese-Style

LISA KATAYAMA — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:40:13 PDT

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!

Dilemma: You're the only human left on the planet, and you have to figure out how to outrun a flock of zombies at dusk. The zombies in your neighborhood are just slightly faster than humans on foot—you need a quick and effective method of increasing speed.

Solution: Put a rubber band around your ankle. Then stretch one end of it toward your toes and hook it over the big toe, twisting it once to make a figure eight. Repeat on your other foot.

Why this works: The rubber bands help your feet expand and contract even further than they normally do in the forefoot. This provides greater power during the push-off phase of the gait cycle, enabling you to run a little faster.

Urawaza [Amazon]

Karen Joy Fowler's Latest Novel is Science Fiction in the Present

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:24:15 PDT

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.

Rima, our main character, begins the novel as the last surviving member of her family at the age of 29. Her mother and brother died before her father did, and she still hasn't quite gotten over their losses either. Grief-addled, she decides to stay for a while with her godmother Addison Early, a famous mystery writer who named a murderer after Rima's father Bim in one of her novels. A fan of Addison's writing, Mira decides to figure out what actually happened between her father and the novelist to inspire her strange fictional homage to him.

In the process, she plunges into an edit war on Wikipedia, discovers distorted descriptions of herself on LiveJournal because Addison's fans are obsessed with everything related to the author, and learns that there are whole communities devoted to writing slash fiction about Bim-the-murderer and Addison's detective character Maxwell Lane. Her relationships to the the electronic ghosts of her father, her godmother, and herself are in some ways more compelling than her real-life relationships with them. It's as if Rima is already living partly in cyberspace, forging alliances with constructed identities that take on lives of their own.

As she puts together the puzzle of her father's past, Rima discovers that a mystery of the fictional Maxwell's childhood is tied to a mystery in her father's past — a mystery involving a white supremacist commune near Santa Cruz called Holy City, led by a guy named William Riker. Making all of this weirder is the fact that Holy City was a real place (Fowler actually quotes at length from the actual Wikipedia entry about it, though she adds a fictional edit war to it). And yes, the commune was actually run by a guy who happens to share a name with a famous character from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Of course, the Star Trek franchise shows up in the plot too. And Rima has to go boldly to various places she's never gone to finally make peace with her family — both its fictional incarnations and the parts of it that remain in real life.

Fowler tells her story of fragmented, multiple identities in a charming, clear voice that never takes itself too seriously. As a result the novel manages to be cyber-surreal while also coming across as rather homey and sweet. I suppose that's what you get from a Jane Austen fan who is addicted to the internet.

While there are no aliens here, or artificial intelligences who come to life, Wit's End manages to skirt the edges of science fiction themes beautifully, hinting at the ways our lives have become the stuff of science fiction without us noticing. It takes a book like this to remind us that the high-tech fracturing of our identities is also, weirdly, something that can make us whole.

Wit's End [Amazon]

Secret History of Infocom's Never-Released "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" Game

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:16:30 PDT

One of the coolest text adventure games of the 1980s was Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on Douglas Adams' bestselling novel of the same name. Though the game was wildly popular, and a sequel to it was rumored repeatedly, nobody has ever known exactly what happened to that sequel. Until now. Andy Baio, the investigative journo-technologist at Waxy, has received a mysterious network drive from which he recovered all the notes, plans, emails, and information about what Infocom was going to do with the sequel that would have been called Milliways. And he's published it for all to see.

Baio writes:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

Some of the highlights include weird infighting emails between people obviously frustrated with the bureaucratic process of game design. And sad emails about how Infocom's finances are hurting. My favorites are moments when people talk about groups of two or three people designing a game — and complain when more are going to be brought in.

We also learn that the software infrastructure of the game might have actually become a character in the game itself. Designer Stu Galley wrote in an email:

I've been talking with Tim Anderson about using the New Parser in this game. It still needs a lot of development, and in the end it may prove to be slow in operating, but it promises to be very capable. Now here's the question: should the game itself make a big deal out of the New Parser? For example, the game could begin with the parser introducing itself to the player, asking the player to type a few sentences to "warm up" the parser, before getting on with the story itself. The parser could take on a personality, explaining that this is its first job, that it means well but it may not succeed. Perhaps it gets depressed and refuses to work at all. Perhaps the parser is in fact Marvin's new aural interface module, depressing him even further.

Want the full story? Check out Baio's amazing writeup.

Milliways: Infocom's Unpublished Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Waxy.org]

Rudy Rucker's Math Orgy Classic "Sex Sphere" Gets Reissued

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:40:29 PDT

We've written about scifi author Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker's forgotten 1980s classic The Sex Sphere before — it's the novel where a bunch of hypermatter creatures take the forms of blobs with breasts and genitals and try to conquer Earth. It almost works, too. Everybody gets so into having sex with the blobs that they become obedient alien slaves. Luckily, our heroes figure out a way to deal with the genitacular menace using extremely complicated math. Long out of print, the book is now about to be reborn as a print-on-demand deal. And Rucker has just released a picture of the book's new cover, which he painted himself. Check it out below (NSFW) — it must be seen to be believed.

That's a sex sphere alright.

Rucker will be offering his novel Spacetime Donuts as a print-on-demand book too. Both should be out this summer. We'll let you know as soon as the URLs exist.

The Sex Sphere, etc. [Rudy's Blog]

Greatest Time-Travel Duels Of All Time(lines)

Charlie Jane Anders — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:30:00 PDT

Some of the greatest battles in science fiction haven't involved dogfights or shoot-outs, but time-traveling smackdowns, with two different people trying to change history out from under each other. Like Marty and Biff, trying to wipe out each other's timelines in this clip from Back To The Future 2. As soon as you have more than one time machine, you can have timeline-altering sniper fights, and whoever can erase the other person's time line first wins. Start your paradox engines, and may the slipperiest time-trickster win!

Time Cop. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only one who can safeguard history against those who would change it for their own evil ends. But a corrupt U.S. Senator (Ron Silver) is messing with the timeline in order to become president in 2004. Van Damme quickly figures out what's going on. But then Silver changes history some more, so when Van Damme returns to his present, everything has changed and Van Damme no longer has a job. It's up to Jean-Claude to go back once again and change the past a second time, getting rid of Silver in the process. Weirdly, this is one of the best movies about time travel in spite of its action-movie star.

(Versions of Van Damme's Time Cops show up a lot in SF, including the ChronoGuard in Jasper FForde's Thursday Next novels, and the temporal police from the 29th century, who show up in Star Trek: Voyager a few times. Stephen Hawking has famously theorized that some kind of temporal police must exist, to prevent the horrendous paradoxes that would otherwise happen. In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, they're referred to as the "Quantum Angels.")

Primer. Abe and Aaron create a time machine, which requires you to lay inside it for as long as you want to go back for. They go back and start meddling with their own pasts, speculating on the stock market and tinkering with other things. But soon they're making more serious changes — knocking out their past selves and taking their places. They live through the same day or two over and over again, creating alternate timelines with subtle differences each time. Eventually, Abe and Aaron start trying to counter each other's interference, but keeping up with which version of Abe or Aaron you're seeing gets trickier and trickier.

Back to the Future Part 2. When "Doc" Brown carelessly leaves his Delorean time machine unguarded, that big lunkhead Biff goes back in time to 1955 and gives his younger self the means to become rich and powerful far beyond his pathetic dreams. Our hero, Marty, has to go back in time to 1955 for the second time in a row — except instead of changing Biff's future as he did in the first movie, he's just trying to undo the changes that Biff has already made.

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Jud Eliott III gets a job as a time courier, showing tourists the wonders of history. But some of his crazy colleagues start messing around with the timeline and wrecking history, so he has to keep going back and trying to fix the damage without attracting the attention of the Time Patrol. And then he falls in love with a time paradox named Pulcheria, his own great-great-great-great-grandmother, and it all goes to pot.

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Harlan belongs to a time agency called Eternity, which exists outside of time itself. He and his fellow agents go around changing history to reduce human suffering. But then Harlan has a falling-out with his bosses over his girlfriend Noÿs, whom they want to erase from history. Harlan is supposed to help one of his colleagues, Cooper, go back to the 24th century and become the scientist whose discoveries later make the Eternals possible. In a fit of pique, Harlan sends Cooper back to 1932 instead, so he can't lay the groundwork for Eternity and Eternity will never exist. Finally, after the Eternals un-erase his girlfriend, he agrees to go back and rescue Cooper from the past — but then his girlfriend Noÿs reveals that Eternity's secret purpose is to edit history to make sure humans never colonize the stars. So instead Harlan helps her to change history so that humans discover atomic energy earlier, and start down the path of space exploration. As a consequence, Eternity ceases ever to have existed.

Lightning by Dean Koontz. Laura has a guardian angel who shows up to help her whenever she's in danger, but then it turns out other people are trying to undo the "angel's" work. Some evil Nazi time travelers are trying to destroy Laura. As Laura's son explains:

They can hopscotch around us.. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like... if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.

It also contains the great line, "How can you win against goddamn time travelers?" How indeed?

Doctor Who. For a show all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn't have that many stories where the Doctor and another time-traveler are both changing the timeline back and forth, surprisingly. But the Doctor and his fellow Time Lord the Master get into some duels on a few occasions. The most over-the-top is in the comedy special "Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Death," where the Master and Doctor meet up in a castle. The Master goes back in time and bribes the architect to put a trapdoor right where the Doctor happens to be standing. But then it turns out the Doctor also went back in time, and bribed the architect even more — to put the trapdoor where the Master is standing instead.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a lot of cris-crossing back and forth in Reg Chronotis' time machine (much of which is lifted somewhat from the episodes Adams wrote for Doctor Who. In particular, the ghost of the last surviving Salaxian possesses a disgruntled literary magazine editor, inspiring him to go back in time to repair the Salaxian spaceship before it can explode, back at the dawn of life on Earth — which will have the effect of making sure life never develops on this planet. The instructions for fixing the ship are buried in the second half of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." But Chronotis and Dirk Gently, our detective hero, go back to Coleridge's time and ensure he never finishes that poem, so the instructions are lost and the alien plot is foiled.

Terminator. The Terminator movies and TV show are all about people and cyborgs traveling back in time to change, or safeguard history. The machines want to kill Sarah Connor before she can ever give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, so John sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect him — and Kyle becomes John's daddy. And then, the machines send more cyborgs back to kill John, and eventually Kyle's brother Derek ends up back in our time hanging out with his friend/nephew as well. And Sarah Connor either dies of cancer or travels forward in time past her own death date and somehow avoids it. Maybe in the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles the machines will figure out they just have to wipe out the Reese brothers as kids, and all their problems go away.

Time After Time. H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper battle each other in the bizarre future of 1979. Once they both reach the future, time travel doesn't play that much of a part in the story — except that at one point, Wells travels forward in time three days with his girlfriend Amy, only to find Amy's obituary in a newspaper. They have to travel back again and prevent Jack the Ripper from making Amy his fifth victim. (In the end, it turns out the obituary was mistaken, and it was Amy's friend who was murdered.) And then Amy goes back to the 19th century and marries Wells, changing history at least somewhat.

Meet The Robinsons. An animated Disney film, very loosely based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson. Tom Selleck invents a time machine. (We'll just pause to let you absorb that piece of info.) And then a villain named Bowler Hat Guy travels back in time to sabotage a memory-scanning machine that a kid named Lewis has invented, which gave rise to all the amazing inventions in Tom Selleck's utopian future. ("Tom Selleck's Utopian Future" will be my next band name.) So Tom Selleck's son Wilbur has to travel back in time to our time, to make sure Lewis repairs the memory-scanning machine.

Crime Traveler. In this British TV series, a physicist named Holly Turner invents a time machine, and a lazy detective named Slade uses it to travel back in time and solve crimes before they happen. But in the final episode, a criminal gets his own time machine, and travels back in time to give himself an airtight alibi for a couple of murders. Slade has to travel back as well, to catch the other time traveler in the act.

Research by Nivair Gabriel

Will Efficient Social Software Take Your Job Away?

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:30:00 PDT

Social software sites like Flickr and Digg aren't just distracting you from your job — they could actually make your job disappear in the next high tech economic revolution. Get ready to retrain yourself right now. A new book by NYU interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, is a good place to start. Although Shirky predicts the demise or extreme downscaling of a lot of familiar jobs right now — everything from design to procedural legal work — he's also got a lot of telling observations about the future of work, social relationships, and even politics, based on years of researching how people communicate online. We cornered Shirky on IM and asked him about the future of our jobs in a world where everyone can publish and collaborate online for free.

io9: So you're talking about these social tools, and how communities can use them, but of course you're also talking about "user generated content," which is one way of saying "get people to work for you for free."

CS: Depends on your frame of reference.

io9: Are we looking at a future where getting a job means working for free for many years before you get to be a developer or producer for cash?

CS: If we think of Flickr as being like a newspaper, then yes, the content that was previously paid for is now free. But if you think of flickr as being like a bar, then what you get instead is that the user conversation now creates value for people out of earshott. No one complains that the bar marks up its booze prices because it's a place for people to get together.

io9: So the bar gets paid for your conversations?

CS: I think the whole 'you work, we collect the money' model has been over-emphasized by the fact that professional media covering these new tools will of course be biased to take the current media model as the 'correct' one. Merchants, a bar in Manhattan, charges $17 for a martini. Know what goes into a $17 martini?

io9: What?

CS: $3 of gin and $14 of "I'm in a bar where people pay $17 for a martini!"

io9: But that makes Flickr sound like an elite place where you pay to be around beautiful rich people.

CS: So the change in the price of drinking gin at home alone, or in a bar with others, is mainly a metric of social value, and we're quite used to paying the platform operator, which in this case would be the bar owner, for making a site where that value can accrue. Of course the whole 'is it a newspaper or a bar' thing is even one level too shallow. The thing Flickr is most like is Flickr. It has all kinds of novel characteristics which are exactly the things that get obscured by metaphor. So when media people look at Flickr (or Digg or YouTube) as new competitors in an existing media ecosystem, instead of a new ecosystem, they create bias towards old metrics.

Oh, and to your earlier comment, I don't mean to suggest that Flickr always equals merchants, just that we are more than used to business models where almost all of the value in the establishment comes from value the patrons create for themselves. It's just that the press doest see (or sees and doesn't like) that comparison, because its hard to argue that some injustice is being doen when viewed in the light of social life rather than media production.

io9: The problem I guess with the bar analogy is that the most "valuable" bars to be in are often valuable because they are full of elite people — which is sort of the opposite of what I think you're hoping for in this book.

CS: Well, even a $2 well drinks dive has the same economics. Consider happy hour. There is a discount on the nominal product precisely to create the necessary bit of social value.

io9: So to get back to the question of getting paid. Sounds like you're saying that we're tending toward a model where the people who make content (or art or writing) don't get paid,
but the people who make the tools that let them express themselves do.

CS: That is one part of the effect. Another part is that, on average people won't get paid, because the pool of creators has gotten too large. But significant talent will still be rewarded. Wedding photographers and stock photo people are going to get creamed. But Herb Ritts' fees may go up. When the bottleneck is not longer worth paying for (because it mostly doesn't exist) talent becomes the only differentiating metric.

io9: So the elite content producers may get more?

CS: I think so.

io9: Obviously a lot of people are decrying this idea, particularly in the media — "oh no we're losing taste makers!"

CS: We're not losing taste makers! I hate that argument — we're gaining taste makers, at an unbelivable rate. We're losing scarcity.

io9: So do you think in the end we'll get a world where more people will be compensated to do creative work? Or that creative work will become more lilke cooking, where everybody does it?

CS: More people overall, maybe, but many fewer on average. And most of the ones who do get compensated don't have it as their main source of income.

io9: Which other industries do you see this change affecting?

CS: Anything where there is a production bottleneck. So the obvious ones are non-litigation lawyering, librarians, anyone in the media distribution business, but also the info managing pieces of things like industrial design, medical decision making, etc.

io9: Are you worried at all that people might use your book to exploit users?

CS: Most of the uses of this sort of group-forming are hard to fake over any length of time (imagine a fake open source project — the coders would bail in a matter of weeks), but the uses of social tools for groups from Al Qaeda to the pro-anorexia kids seems to me to be the biggest social threat that will come from the medium.

Check out the book — although Shirky isn't a futurist, Here Comes Everybody is the best work of futurism I've read in quite a while.

Here Comes Everybody [ISBN.nu]

A 40-Year Acid Trip, From Literary Axe-Man And Heroes Creator

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:24:00 PDT

A collaboration so unlikely, it could have come from alternate history: Tim Kring, creator of TV's Heroes, is teaming up with Dale Peck, the literary author and critic best known for calling Rick Moody the worst writer of his generation. Their trilogy will be an alternate history/science fiction story that starts in the 1960s and runs to the near future. And, as you might expect from Kring, it involves uncanny superpowers. The unnamed series joins a new vogue for literary alt-history.

In Kring and Peck's trilogy, a man named Chandler Forrest takes part in LSD experiments administered by the CIA in the 1960s, and gains strange abilities. Given the fact that the book spans four or five decades, you can expect it to be sort of sprawling and involve tons of intricate conspiracies. Besides trashing Rick Moody (and David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen) Peck is best known for the 1993 AIDS novel Martin and John. His most recent novel, The Garden Of Lost and Found, was about a Midwesterner who moves to New York, but you can't read it because it got withdrawn in the wake of the closure of Carroll & Graf when parent company Avalon changed hands.

Alternate history, formerly the preserve of genre authors like Harry Turtledove, has been gaining a new currency in recent years. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America explores an alternate World War II where Charles Lindbergh deposes FDR. And Resistance by Owen Sheers also explores a WWII where things went differently, in this case a version where the Nazis overrun Russia and take over half of Britain. And of course, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in an Alaska that became the new Jewish homeland.

The other interesting thing about the Kring/Peck deal with Crown was how they sold the book: they only had 25 pages of material (presumably including an outline) and a video trailer that editors had to sign onto a password-protected Web site to watch. It's become common practice for authors to make video trailers for novels once they're published, but I've never heard of authors selling a book to a publisher using a video. The future of publishing? [Observer] Acid blotter art by Trevor Brown.

Nuclear-Gnome Novel Channels A Punk-Rock Vonnegut

Charlie Jane Anders — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:10:00 PDT

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.)

We get various hints that things have already gone super-dystopian by the time Under My Roof starts: economic collapse has created a whole bunch of newly minted poor people who compete with Daniel Weinberg as he's scavenging smoke-detectors from the landfill. The United States is now at war with 40 different countries all over the world, and everything's sort of teetering on the brink of social collapse.

After Weinbergia declares itself to be an independent country, things get quite silly, with tons of other microstates springing up all over the U.S. — some of them as small as one person's skirt, some of them the size of a whole town. Meanwhile, our telepathic young narrator, Herb Weinberg, finds himself surrounded by more and more insanity as pretty much every adult character acts like a maniac. And thanks to Herb's telepathy, we get a privileged view of quite how random and id-driven most of these people are.

At one point, I thought Under My Roof was just aiming to be a kind of goofy political satire — and there's nothing wrong with that, especially when real life politics is getting goofier all the time. But then in the last chunk of the book, things came together in a way that suddenly felt a lot more purposeful. Without giving too much away, the book's two strands — Daniel's house seceding from the U.S., and Herb's telepathy — suddenly intersect and make sense as parts of the same book.

Most of all, Daniel's mind-reading becomes a way in to see how much everybody is faking it, all the time. In one great passage, he flashes back to a time when his kindergarten teacher was having trouble controlling all her kids and "decided to put a scare into us":

She spotted a man in the window of a creaky old building with one of htose haunted house porches, he was a handyman who was fixing the place up a bit to sell, and pointed to him and said, "Behave, or that man'll get you!" and obligingly the man raised his arms, a long screwdriver in his right hand, and howled like an animal. They didn't know each other, it wasn't a plan. It was just two grown-ups acting in solidarity, because they know how important it is to keep kids terrified and obedient.

That's part of the bit where the book suddenly clicked for me. I finally got the over-arching theme Mamatas was going for, which is that it's all fictional: parenthood, nationhood, and authority of all kinds. It's all just a fiction created to keep people in line, and there's nothing stopping us from creating our own ad-hoc versions, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre.

Under My Roof is getting reissued soon by Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press, and it's a very quick read at 40,000 words. Check it out.

Podcast the Power Grid Apocalypse with JC Hutchins

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:20:00 PDT

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.

You can see more videos shot during the blackout here, including one by Hutchins' fellow podcasting novelist Mur Lafferty. But as the inclusion of pros like Lafferty makes clear, this isn't going to be pure user-generated madness. Hutchins has lined up contributions from frequent Star Wars novel writer Michael Stackpole, as well as Scott Sigler, podcaster and author of Infected. Yes, it's a giant circle of SF podcasting goodness.

And you can play along too. Writes Hutchins:

How can you play? You gotta believe in this conceit: On November 19, 2007, the U.S. suffered a coordinated terrorist attack, and was plunged into a nationwide blackout. The country devolved into chaos. Power and order were restored two weeks later. You are invited to be a participant in that blackout. I'm opening the gates and empowering you to create content that will appear in the OBSIDIAN podcast and YouTube experience. You can record video of yourself suffering through this mayhem. You can call a voice mail number and leave a panicked message, or a news report from the field.

I like the idea that "a panicked message" from an excited fan could wind up in the pages of Hutchins' next novel. This is like an ARG that actually means something.

Become a Victim of the Obsidian Blackout [JC Hutchins]

Why Is Space Opera Unsung?

Charlie Jane Anders — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 PDT

The New Space Opera, a recent anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, was supposed to testify to the resurgent vitality of the space-opera sub-genre. Instead, it showcases a new space-opera canon that's listless and cut off from the mainstream, argues reviewer Alan DeNiro in Rain Taxi. Find out why the space-opera renaissance doesn't make DeNiro want to sing, and why his review sparked a soul-searching discussion among the authors, below the fold.

DeNiro's review starts out by asserting that space opera hasn't crossed over to the mainstream as much as other subgenres of science fiction have. Cormac McCarthy may have made the post-apocalyptic dystopia story respectable with The Road, but nobody's writing literary epics about "hyperactive starships."

And then DeNiro launches into his actual critique of The New Space Opera: most of the stories are actually about posthuman characters who have been modified to survive in deep space. They've given up so much of their humanity to become spaceworthy, it's made them emotionally inacessible to readers. And they're tiny, against the massive scale of galaxy-wide intrigues and thousand-year wars. (I definitely found this to be a problem with some of the stories in the volume as well, when I read it last year.) Contrast this with old-school space opera, which was comfortable putting regular old humans in charge of its starships.

But the stories fail to engage with the fact of their characters' emotional dissociation as part of the narrative. And if you're going to write alienating mini-sagas about transhumanism, DeNiro suggests, you need masterful prose instead of the merely serviceable writing in this anthology. Most of all, the anthology promises "fun," but delivers careful, hide-bound stories instead. DeNiro does pick out a few exceptions, including James Patrick Kelly's "Dividing The Sustain" and Tony Daniel's "The Valley Of The Gardens."

DeNiro's bracing critique gave rise to an interesting roundtable discussion, which he participated in, over at SF Signal, which mostly dealt with the meta-question he raised: why hasn't space opera crossed over to the mainstream the way other SF sub-genres have? Authors from the anthology tried to answer, or refute, DeNiro's question.

Kage Baker asks why space opera needs to be relevant anyway. Paul McAuley attempts to claim that Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series was mainstream. (It's probably the least mainstream of all her works.) Tobias Buckell cites the popularity of Star Wars as proof that space opera really is mainstream. Anthology co-editor Jonathan Strahan argues that you shouldn't think of space-opera as entrenched within the science fiction field, but rather as at the center of the SF field. Gwyneth Jones says space-opera is more versatile than people give it credit for, and it's a good vehicle for asking questions about statecraft.

In the end, though, none of them addressed DeNiro's question of whether "new" space opera has to gain its newness by jettisoning the humanity of its characters. And whether that might be part of the reason why it's not relatable for readers who aren't die-hard science fiction fans. [Rain Taxi] and [SF Signal]

The Most Disturbing Alternate History You'll Ever Read

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:08:54 PDT

If Philip K. Dick's "Axis won the war" novel Man in the High Castle made you squirm, then the 1980s novels about Lord Horror and his Nazi England will make your brain explode. The Lord Horror novels — Lord Horror, followed by Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz — are vicious, psychedelic satire about a Nazi DJ (Lord Horror) in England after Germany wins World War II. Written by underground publishers David Britton and Michael Butterworth, owners of the notorious Savoy Books, the first novel was declared obscene in court and got Britton sent to jail for four months. Now, cult author and critic Keith Seward (who wrote Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish under the name Supervert) has helped revive the long-suppressed scifi classics in a collection called Horror Panegyric. It brings together Seward's essay about the Lord Horror books with excerpts from the novels. And you can read it online for free.

Writes Seward in his introduction to the book:

Unlike Dick or Spinrad, sci-fi writers who confined Nazis to a book or two, Britton and Butterworth have pursued their theme with a probably disturbing intensity that can be quantitatively measured in the sheer volume of Lord Horror productions. What's more, they do not tack a moral to the end of their tales. This is not to say that there are no morals but rather that there are no easy answers, seals of approval, rubber stamps, calmatives ("don't worry, it's just fiction, the jackboots won't hurt you"). Their work is not ideological, like a hate tract, but is rather a deliberate collision of seemingly incompatible ideologies: death camp + dream factory = ? Satire, hyperbole, and reductio ad absurdum work to energize, anger, inspire, offend, but the one thing they do not do to readers is pacify. And why should anyone be pacified by Nazis, even fictional ones?

Seward's essay alone makes great, thoughtful lunchtime reading, especially if you like your scifi on the transgressive side. And once you've read what he has to say about Lord Horror, you'll definitely want to check out the excerpts themselves.

Horror Panegyric [Supervert]