I had such hopes for this post. I was going to compare the two big AI movies that came out over the past few weeks. I was going to celebrate the ways in which a common theme could be explored through bombast vs. introspection, through Socratic dialog vs. the more wisecracky kind. I wasn’t expecting […]
Colony Creature
Category: fibletI once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus. I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe […]
Gendering Nemo.
Category: biology, ink on art, just putting it out there...With Special Opening Act, Tony Smith! What do Dune, The Road, Blindsight, Anathem, and I Am Legend all have in common? Together, they comprise The Five Worst SF Books EVER, as compiled by my buddy, Tony Smith over at Starship Sofa. Of course, this is hardly the first time Blindsight has been so honored— but […]
And they call it… Puppy Love…
Category: ink on art“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” —Martha Graham, as cited by Orphan Black‘s Tatiana Maslany in today’s NY Times. So as […]
Person of Interest
Category: ink on artTough-as-nails lady cop who gets the job done, check. Taciturn mysterious bad-ass stranger haunted by a dark past, check. Dumpy rumpled detective on the take, check. Manic pixie dream girl, check. Warrior Chick Who Takes Shit From No Man, check. Dweeby computer nerd with thick glasses and limited social skills, check. Starched cardboard villain with […]
Pones and Bones: A Trip to Anti-Narnia.
Category: ink on art, misc, writing newsWe open with trailers for Coming Attractions: to the immediate right you can see the French cover for Echopraxie, from Fleuve. I like it. Whoever the artist is, they’re channeling a bit of a Giger vibe. Immediately below, on the other hand, is the cover for Head of Zeus’s UK edition (they’re the guys who […]
The Gene Genies, Part 2: The Genes that Wouldn’t Die.
Category: biotech, evolution, Intelligent Design (the novel)Evolution with Foresight: an oxymoron, right? Evolution has no foresight. Natural selection only promotes what works in the moment. If a particular mutation doubles your reproductive rate, you will fill the world with thy numbers; the process doesn’t understand too much of a good thing, doesn’t care if greater fecundity today means overpopulation, starvation, and […]
The Gene Genies, Part 1: The Squids of Lamarck.
Category: biotech, evolution, Intelligent Design (the novel), marine, neuroYou know the drill. DNA holds the source code; RNA carries it to the ribosomes; ribosomes build stuff for the cell. Of course, the details of cellular operation are a million times more intricate than this— some RNA acts not to courier code but to switch genes on and off, for example— but it’s this […]
Optimism Averted (Or, Has Anyone Ever Seen Lockheed Martin and the Koch Brothers in the Same Place at the Same Time?)
Category: sciliticsI’ve been mired in a funk of hopefulness over the past week or so. I blame 03— who, a couple of posts back, reminded me of last autumn’s announcement from Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works (I’d seen it at the time, but had apparently repressed the memory). One of the world’s largest aerospace firms— about the […]
Bedlam and the Bookies
Category: misc, writing newsSo it’s official. As of Tuesday— and as most of you probably know already— Echopraxia won the CBC’s “Bookie Award” in the “Best SciFi, Speculative Fiction, or Fantasy” category, beating out Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven by (as of the close-to-midnight screen grab to the right) 300 votes. It was a much closer race […]