io9: readings

io9 Last Week: Autism Pills, Madness, and the Tallest Giant Monster

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:04:28 PST

This week, we did some strange things, like count how many science fiction stories have appeared in The New Yorker over the past few decades (surprise: Tina Brown's era saw the most scifi). You'll discover that the venerable magazine has never published William Gibson, though it did publish two parodies of his work. We listed the best swear words from scifi pop culture, told you about five Bollywood scifi movies you should know, enumerated the five ways 9/11 changed science fiction (with over a dozen examples), speculated about how the Justice League of America movie could be saved. Then we shocked you by claiming that Greatest American Hero might become a movie.

You weighed in on two important debates: Why is Land of the Lost so much cooler than Lost? And could you cut Superman with a light saber? Just to make your lives easier, we also determined once and for all who the tallest giant monster really is.

We showed you some of the very best dystopian fetish comics (NSFW), and we asked you to identify what's wrong with this Philip K. Dick book cover from the 1970s. You got to gawk at plans for a 2-mile high eco-tower that would house 1 million people, and check out pictures of St. Petersburg's market center, the first part of the city to be placed under a glass ceiling, and perhaps the first stage in making the whole of St. Petersburg a domed city.

Madness was a big theme this week: we told you everything you need to know about the madness of Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity and a death ray, and we considered the way Cthulhu can drive people mad in a clip from the superlative film Call of Cthulhu. And finally, we tried to drive you mad with this clip of the scariest special effect ever created (NSFW).

We reviewed the final Y the Last Man comic book, told you about three science fiction novels recommended by free software guru Richard Stallman, and rhapsodized about The Descent, a cheesy but thought-provoking novel about how the military conquers an elusive human sub-species that has populated tunnels deep beneath the ocean. You also got to hear about Marc Guggenheim's new comic, which is about a post-post-apocalypse after the aliens leave Earth.

In science, we explained that chameleons change color to communicate, not camouflage. We speculated about how new breakthroughs in autism research would lead to pills that can make you temporarily autistic, and pills that can cure autism. We also talked about how neuroscience explains the mechanism that makes you feel pleasure when you hurt yourself.

We are also looking to hire interns and a graphic designer. Please apply before Feb. 20.

io9 Last Week: Art And Romance, With Teeth Bared

charliejane — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:00:23 PST

We thought long and hard about our spoiler policy before unveiling it last Monday. And in the week that followed, we've been remarkably well-behaved, despite one picture that people mistakenly thought was representational. You can now peruse our front page with no fear that you'll learn anything about upcoming storylines. (I almost said "no fear that you'll learn anything," period.)

Actually, we managed to pack a fair bit of information into our newly spoiler-compliant blog. We helped you get religion with our list of the dumbest space gods, and warned you about the nastiest sewer monsters and showed you the biggest guns. And we shared our scariest movie locations with you. There were so many great car chases in scifi, we had to break our list into two parts.

Meanwhile, Lynn Peril dissected the awesomest and cruddiest parts of Lost. And a video clip illustrated the easy way to clone an adult woman. As an adult. You also witnessed the secret power of an Atlantean in tight bathing trunks. And people had a spirited discussion on our review of this weekend's date movie Teeth.

And we had an art frenzy as well. Android sculptures can do anything you can do, only shinier. We showed you pictures of Canadian-Chinese-French manga-robot-porcelain mashups, plus robots and donuts. And check out this transparent floating cube house. Cube house!! Not to mention the fearsome cyber-crow. And the floating mosque.

Once we discovered that science fiction was more meaningful than literature, we got all excited about books. Daniel Wilson taught us how to survive an alien invasion. Plague novelist Barth Anderson explained why science fiction hasn't gotten on the "epidemic lit" bandwagon. And you told us which books scream "romance" to you. Elizabeth Bear's online war-machine story totally blew us away.

We also went science crazy! Everything scientific was mega-huge, including mega-environmentalism and a mega-chemical that cures loneliness. All of the mega-science got our brains so swelled up, we needed nano-brain-surgery.

We profiled Japan's wackiest inventor. And exposed the U.S.' burning need for a space race with China. And we talked to the directors of techno-horror-scifi movie The Signal. And we told you why the Sarah Jane Adventures is hotter than Torchwood. Now when will we get our Sarah Jane DVDs in the U.S.?

io9 Last Week: We Put the Funk Back in the Cyber

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:06:45 PST

We're ready to come clean about the fact that we went a little Cloverfield-crazy last week. We explained that the movie is about 9/11 as much as it is about monsters; and then we talked to Cloverfield director Matt Reeves about Gojira and the strange whispers at the end of his movie. We also gave you a definitive list of the ten best New York monsters (OK, one is from New Jersey), and showed you a clip from North Korea's greatest monster movie.

Everybody got their knickers in a bunch when io9 columnist Geoff Manaugh talked about how to make a monster movie for the Red States. We also discussed whether autonomous combat robots would be held accountable for war crimes in the future. Then we really got people riled up when we suggested that Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" sucks as a narrative device, and gave you a chart showing how many scifi stories are enslaved to Campbellian cliches.

But we soothed you by offering some suggestions for 10 scifi songs you can take to a barren asteroid, and telling you about the 10 hottest sex robots in scifi.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have impressed us a bit too much. We interviewed Summer Glau, who plays the new Terminator cyborg, and then we told you the show is way, way better than Bionic Woman ever was, but we also criticized it for wimpifying Sarah Connor (we've got clips from the unaired pilot that show definitively that her character was softened up). And we suggested that the show make itself more like the Sopranos.

We showed you pictures of a train-sized drill munching its way through a massive wall of concrete to build a subway tunnel; images of a future where nature is so unnatural that it has become an amusement park; concept art from upcoming dimensions-collide MMO "The Day" where giant robots repair the Arc de Triomphe in a kind of impressionistpunk moment; let you glimpse a beautiful silvery alien preparing for her wedding night; and passed along some snapshots of strange, spaceship-grade aluminum houses in Canada.

We talked to science fiction writer and nanopunk pioneer Kathleen Ann Goonan, author of the Nanotech Quartet, about the difference between "hard" and "soft" nanotech futures. We also gave you a sneak peek at the prologue of Iain M. Banks' new novel Matter (coming out in February!), and told you to read his unsung Culture novel Inversions while you wait impatiently for his new book.

We also told you where to find seven great scifi comic books to read for free online, and recommended a book about all the Superman movies that never were.

You may love cyberpunk, but our chart showing a decline in cyberpunk movies and books over the past decade is hard to refute. And it's also hard to argue that cyber is "punk," when we found so many commercials with cyberpunk themes.

In science, we told you about a new government study of Morgellons, the bizarre disease where brightly-colored wires grow in your skin; a new scientific breakthrough that could allow humans to live for 800 years with a little gene-tinkering and caloric restriction; how genetic engineers stuck bat genes into mice and made mice with proto-wings; and we warned you that a form of sexually-transmitted, flesh-eating bacteria is bubbling up in San Francisco and Boston.

We enticed you with a forgotten clip displaying the silly outfits in SciFi Channel's Dune miniseries; showed off the coolness of upcoming zombie-outsourcing dystopia movie Sleep Dealer; gave you a taste of the new season of Torchwood with its kissy-fighty feeling; and we hooked you up with a clip of Will Smith doing his "drunk Superman" impersonation in the upcoming super-anti-hero movie Hancock.

We celebrated MacWorld in our own special way by giving you a brief history of reality distortion fields (RDF) in science fiction, acknowledging that Steve Jobs is the first non-science fiction character to possess an RDF. We also got your feedback on how io9 should deal with spoilers in posts, and will announce the outcome and our policy next week.

The Best of io9 Last Week

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:40:20 PST

On io9 last week, we explained the five marks of Clinton-Era science fiction, identified five potential alternate histories of New York City that nobody has written a scifi novel about yet, gave you a NSFW peek at the greatest scifi porn of all time, debated which are the best zombies of science fiction, and told you to go out and read a new English translation of Osamu Tezuka's manga Apollo right now.

We talked to science fiction writer Charles Stross about sex and prisons, and to Ken MacLeod, author of The Execution Channel, about why science fiction writers are obsessed with the near future.

Cloverfield designer Martin Whist told us about the movie's "stark realism". Canadian SF writer and filmmaker Jim Munroe stopped by to tell us about one science fiction novel that changed political rhetoric forever.

We asked you to ogle a picture of a house made of 110 tons of steel, 3D pictures of your brain powered by a console game chipset, 90 images of Stan Lee comic book characters remixed by artists, a gallery of monsters by artist Eliza Gauger, who also designed io9's beautiful logo, and a bunch of photos of the scary-shiny Iron Man suit shown at CES (plus closeups of the cool actuators in his arms and legs).

And to entertain you with short, yummy bits of video, we brought you the mad sexology experiments of The Curious Dr. Humpp, and the amazing laser fight between David "the Hoff" Hasselhoff and a robot in the brilliant 1980s stinker Star Crash, a mashup trailer showing that all adventure movies look the same, and James Bond's greatest space battle (with lasers that go "pew pew pew!") from Moonraker.

We also gave you a peek at forgotten 1970s classic novel The Feminists, all about a scary dystopian future in 1992 when hot, dominant women rule the world and heterosex is a crime!

In science, we explored how carbon nanotubes will make synthetic skin feel pain, and what it would mean to tinker with genes that regulate sleep (hint: insanity may result), a new kind of translucent concrete, and three space-saving tips from the astronauts living in close quarters on the Zvezda, the International Space Station's living quarters.

You gave us a ton of feedback on some polls about what science should be punked (as in cyberpunk) next, and which TV shows should be brought back in re-runs while the writers continue to strike.

The first installment of a regular feature, Beloved Local Bookstore, began with a look inside San Francisco's Borderlands Books. Send us your ideas for more beloved local scifi and comic book stores in your town!

io9 Last Week: Brain Implants, Dire Predictions, and Some Seriously Hot Photos

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:00:23 PST

io9 came to life this past Wednesday on some nanoflop crystal computers in a Martian science outpost. On our first day, we told you what an io9 is and brazenly posted a manifesto called "Addicted to the Future."

We told you about ten scifi books we can't wait to read in 2008, and made some rather strident generalizations about why Star Trek should stay dead.

We wondered whether the United States is the least futuristic country in the world, and then posted an elaborate historical chart of Doctor Who's ambivalent career as a revolutionary.

We also had a series of prolonged triviagasms, making exhaustive lists of fuels for your spaceship gas tank, the best superweapons, the awesomest mobile devices from the future, and the craziest eyeball hacks.

We recommended (only partly sarcastically) that you watch Flash Gordon, ogle a fully-functional synaesthesia machine, drool over hot Storm Trooper pinups, and gaze in stupefied awe at a picture of exploding nanowires.

Also, the Man with Horn Rimmed glasses from Heroes stopped by to chat, Greg Pak talked about writing the comic book series Planet Hulk, and the bloggers at io9 introduced ourselves.