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20 Science Books Every Scifi Fan (and Writer) Should Read
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. More »
must read
A.I.s Are The Only Witnesses To Murder Over A Toxic Abyss
I was incredibly excited when I saw that Adam-Troy Castro, one of my favorite short-story writers, had finally published a novel. And Emissaries From The Dead is as great as I'd hoped, a noirish murder mystery set inside an artificial environment created by A.I.s for some unknown purpose. As with the best detective novels, Andrea Cort's murder investigation uncovers a slew of other mysteries, which unravel the dark secrets of the artificial intelligences and the humans' expedition to study them. More »
urawaza
How to Outrun Zombies, and Other Ways to Solve Problems Japanese-Style
My new book Urawaza is a collection of over 100 tips and tricks from Japan for honing your survival skills, fine-tuning your appreciation of Japanese culture, and eventually making you superhuman. The book is full of quirky Japanese solutions to common problems, along with scientific explanations of why they work. Imagine, for example, that you need to outrun a flock of zombies, like Will Smith in I Am Legend. With the help of a little old-school Japanese wisdom, you can actually run faster. Find out how!More »
wit's end review
Karen Joy Fowler's Latest Novel is Science Fiction in the Present
Bewildered by the death of her father, a woman named Rima finds her balance by plunging into a thicket of half-true tales and half-real avatars on the web. Online, she meets her father again — or at least, the many constructs of him he's left behind via a website he's devoted to his writing, and in the fan fiction people have written about a fictional murderer named after him in a series of mystery novels. Karen Joy Fowler's unsettling, wistful new novel Wit's End offers us a present-day world that is science fictional in the same way William Gibson's recent present-day novels are: Her characters' lives are so deeply bound up with technology that it's hard to tell where human connection ends and internet connectivity begins. The author of brilliant scifi novel Sarah Canary, and more recently of non-scifi bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, Fowler is back in fine form with Wit's End. More »
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Nuclear-Gnome Novel Channels A Punk-Rock Vonnegut
In Nick Mamatas' weird political cartoon of a novel, Under My Roof, a man named Daniel Weinberg decides to build his own nuclear bomb out of hundreds of used smoke detectors, and then declares that his house, and its yard, are an independent country named Weinbergia. The bomb, inside a garden gnome, provides the ultimate deterrent thanks to a TV remote control detonator. Meanwhile, Daniel's pubescent son Herbert is a telepath who can read the thoughts of anyone, anywhere. If that sounds like the setup for an extended skit, with social commentary, you're not far wrong. But the whole thing comes together in a surprising, and rewarding, way. Click through for details (and spoilers.) More »
must read
Vernor Vinge's Forgotten Novel About Scifi Publishers on Another Planet
Although it's easy to love scifi author Vernor Vinge for his most lauded work, like Rainbows End or Fire Upon the Deep, some of his lesser-known novels are more memorable than the great ones. Such is the case with Tatja Grimm's World, a collection of two novellas Vinge published in the late 1960s, coupled with a mid-1980s short story about the same character. That character is Tatja Grimm, a woman on late-medieval world who mysteriously begins to manifest super-intelligence, super-strength — and a super-ability to edit science fiction manuscripts. That last bit is what makes the novel sheer, strange genius, as well as a fascinating glimpse at the creative coming-of-age of one of today's greatest SF writers. More »
must read
Virtual Worlds as Test Tube Societies
Though you may never visit Second Life, you know about it for the same reason you know about MySpace: it's a digital social space that's transforming how we use the web. Except instead of being a bunch of webpages devoted to bad music and OMG WTF, Second Life is a 3D virtual world where people build crazy houses, transform into dragons, and talk a lot about the Metaverse in scary marketing terms. It's something you need to understand, and luckily there's a new book that can explain it all to you. Second Life "embedded journalist" Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life hit bookstores last month, and it's one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive books out there on the topic. (That's Au above, in his Second Life incarnation.) More »
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Sociopath Saves Humanity In "Five Thrillers"
The stand-out piece in the current Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is clearly "Five Thrillers," a novelet by Robert Reed about an antisocial maniac who takes on genetically modified insurgents. "Thrillers" starts small and crazy, and the story of Joseph Carroway's life gets bigger and crazier, until you think it can't possibly go any further — and then it does. Click through details, including non-fatal spoilers. More »
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Become Superhuman, Japanese-Style
In Japanese, the word urawaza means "secret tricks," like knowing that Superman is vulnerable to kryptonite or that certain moves will lead you to the song at the end of the game Portal. Now io9's Lisa Katayama has a whole book of Japanese tricks to turn your everyday life into science fiction, just like in William Gibson novels. The book is called Urawaza, and aside from some practical stuff like how to keep your elbows clean, it also contains obscure Japanese wisdom on a few superpowers. More »
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When Computers Become Gods
Ever since the 1950s, when business environments were slowly being populated by giant, mainframe computers and their minicomputer progeny (which were not so mini in size), science fiction writers have toyed with the idea that computers are about to become gods. You see this in David Gerrold's 1970s novel When HARLIE Was One, as well as in the Terminator franchise, where a computer unleashes Armageddon. But if you trace this theme back, there remains one classic of the computer-as-god genre, and it's a 1950s short story by Isaac Asimov that's available for free online. More »
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The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life
Spring equinox will be here in just a few weeks, and there's no better way to get ready for the seasonal change than to dig into some great science fiction books. io9 wants to help you get in the mood for transformation by offering this list of twenty science fiction novels that could change the way you see the world, and maybe even change your life. Whether it's because they've altered the course of science fiction writing, or simply provide a genuinely alien perspective on ordinary life, these are novels that will rearrange how you think. Check out our list below. More »
must read
Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker's Wildest Ride Yet
It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Singularity happens in Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular, since the title gives that development away. But what happens after the Singularity will surprise you. People usually define the Singularity as the moment when artificial intelligences improve themselves to the point where they surpass us, but Rucker's singularity takes many more forms, and is much more confounding, than that. Here are the ten things that will surprise you about Postsingular. It's all spoilers from here on out! More »
9:00 AM on Thu Feb 28 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
2,168 views,
20 comments
Latest by rudyrucker: @Pegritz: Pegritz, you're ranting at me because you're petulant about being awakenened from your dream of Happy Life in Virtual Reality. Number me no numbers, numberskull. If you want the proof behind my claims, check out my nonfiction book THE more »
matter review
Iain M. Banks' New Novel Kicks Ass on a Galactic Scale
Iain M. Banks is the master of narrative zoom and pan: one minute he'll bring you in very close to a tiny moment in one person's life as she mourns the death of a brother, and the next you'll be spinning in deep space staring at a supermassive artificial world created by liquid-breathing aliens, millions of miles long, made of enormous braided tubes. Which of these minutes matters more? In Banks' new novel Matter, both do — and both are also tragicomically inconsequential. What always pleases about Banks' science fiction novels, many of which are set against the backdrop of a pan-galactic, A.I.-centric, socialist-libertarian society called The Culture, is that Banks always delivers substance and spectacle. You'll get the ethical questions, the sorrowful depictions of war, and the meditations on social evolution. But you'll also get world-shattering explosions, weird-ass aliens, and ancient technologies that are purely there to be fucking cool. More »
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Firefly Novel from Steven Brust is Action-Packed and Fun
Firefly fans and the Browncoats at Whedonesque are rejoicing this week because they have a free ebook set in the Firefly universe from author Steven Brust. Yes, My Own Kind of Freedom is today's lunchtime reading (and, depending on how quickly you read, possibly tomorrow's and the next day's too). More »
must read
Celebrate Black History Month with Aliens
The Carl Brandon Society, a group for people interested in great scifi by and about people of color, has released a list of cool books to read for Black History Month. They include classics and new books that deal with race and ethnicity — on other worlds as well as Earth. io9 pal Claire Light just sent the list to us, so check 'em out, and get reading! More »
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Socio-Sexual Politics in the Body of a Giant Cyborg Near Saturn
John Varley's new novel Rolling Thunder, about the adventures of a Martian military brat, will hit bookstores in early March. But for those of you who aren't enjoying an advance copy like I am, I recommend you kick back this weekend with a classic Varley novel from 1979: Wizard, the second in his Gaia Trilogy. It's a quest tale set inside a vast, ancient cybernetic creature known as Gaia who houses several ecosystems and many species in her habitat-like body. Humans discover her in the Saturn neighborhood, and quickly start to immigrate — especially when they find out that Gaia is willing to heal sick people she deems worthy. More »
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