Fiction
esiegel | September 30, 2012“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” -Rudyard Kipling
You might not believe it, but when I was a kid, I hated writing. Absolutely hated it. And it wasn't because I didn't have anything to write, or because I didn't enjoy communicating my thoughts, or because I didn't like the written word, because I always enjoyed reading. Perhaps because I was a lefty with bad handwriting, I felt that the entire enterprise of writing was against me.
Image credit: samarth over at MemeCenter.
Of course, that was my issue to work through, and not only do I write all…
sb admin | February 26, 2012A cross posting from my Posterous space - a short imagining some implications of lab-grown meat.
He was a huge man, thick forearms dotted with burns and pale scars. He spoke in a dull monotone about the unique difficulties in preparing synthetic meat. Roscoe wondered how much he weighed, and tried to calculate how much that would be worth when sold in Longpig wrappers. As he spoke, Roscoe noticed the chef was absent-mindedly palpating his own arm, as if feeling for the texture of the meat under his skin.
Read Transubstantiation
sciencepunk | February 26, 2012A cross posting from my Posterous space - a short imagining some implications of lab-grown meat.
He was a huge man, thick forearms dotted with burns and pale scars. He spoke in a dull monotone about the unique difficulties in preparing synthetic meat. Roscoe wondered how much he weighed, and tried to calculate how much that would be worth when sold in Longpig wrappers. As he spoke, Roscoe noticed the chef was absent-mindedly palpating his own arm, as if feeling for the texture of the meat under his skin.
Read Transubstantiation
sb admin | November 20, 2011Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…
gregladen | May 28, 2011It is Memorial Day Weekend, which can only mean one thing. It's time for this year's Summer Reading Recommendations List! Unlike the Summer Readings Suggestions: Science list, these books are primarily (but not entirely) fiction. Since I've not read very much fiction over the last year, I polled my facebook friends and assembled their advice here. You may be thinking "Who cares about Laden's facebook friends, what do they know?" and you'd probably be right about that for a lot of topics, but not reading. These people can read! In fact, two or three of them are published authors.…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Remember how I said I was going to do 31 book reviews in January, and well...didn't? On Friday, I finally got reliable internet back, just in time to shut down for the sabbath, so now I'm playing catch up. Got to get about 25 book reviews done today. That should happen, right?
Just a reminder for those participating in the Post-apocalyptic Novel Reading Club (PANRC), we'll be finishing up _Prelude_ by Kurt Cobb this week, and moving on to _Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson next week. We're following that up in March with Pat Frank's _Alas Babylon_. Also, there are still spots in…
drorzel | August 1, 2010The voting for the 2010 Hugo Awards closed last night. I sent in my ballot yesterday, but I'm trying to limit my computer time this weekend, so I didn't post about it until today.
The following lists are my votes, with miscellaneous commentary. The Hugos use a complicated vote-counting scheme, including a "No Award" option to distinguish between works you wouldn't mind seeing win, even if they're not your first choice, and works you consider so bad you would rather see them cancel the award than win.
Best Novel
The City and the City by China Mieville
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson…
grrlscientist | June 17, 2009tags: books, fiction, novels, public libraries
I am back at home, ill, but I managed to mooch a neighbor's uncharacteristically open wireless connection so I have been talking with one of my readers about one of our favorite topics: books. I love reading fiction when I am sick, and currently, I am trying to resist my urge to begin reading the entire Harry Potter series again (for the 14th or 15th time now. Reading HP is a 4-6 week investment that tends to keep me from doing what I should be doing: writing book reviews). During this conversation, I lamented the fact that I've not read many…
bioephemera | May 1, 2009I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan:
With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…
ksharpe | April 8, 2009Originally posted by Brian Switek
On April 6, 2009, at 8:10 AM
One of the unwritten rules of creating a good horror yarn is that the location your story takes place in has to be as frightening as your monster. The setting almost has to act an an extension of the bloodthirsty antagonist; a place that can more easily be seen as its lair than a place of human habitation. In Lincoln Child's latest novel Terminal Freeze that place is Fear Base, a rotting military facility shivering the the shadow of Fear Glacier, and it is stalked by something utterly horrifying.
Readers of The Relic, another…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2009A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles' "random monster" theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.
Publishing in the Journal of Evolutionary Diversions, the major journal in the field, Professor Augustus P. Rillful and his colleagues of the paragenetics laboratory at the University of Münchhausen in Germany have shown…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
I am a fan of science fiction as far back as I can recall. The flights of imagination about large things, ideas and worlds, was enough to trigger off my own imagination. I read pretty well everything I could for over two decades before it all petered out into second rate thick books of fantasy and Star Wars knockoffs. Science fiction had a use-by date, and roughly when Dick Tracy's radio watch became ordinary, it stopped appealing, and I started getting interested in the science.
However, I had to unlearn much of the "science" I had picked up by reading SF (scifi is for latercomers). I…
evolvingthoughts | July 19, 2008
Wow. Just... wow.
This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development, and it moves from being a crime film to a war film at some unspecified point. And it has the best film explosion I have ever seen, because it was not CGI and it actually does what it purports to do.
Below the fold are SPOILERS, so click on at your own risk.
The thing that most affected me was the Joker, not just because Ledger actually invents a new kind of character (…
esiegel | May 8, 2008Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach:
And then Lucas goes and tells me,
Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it!
Really? Me? Well, how would I do it? Let's say we've got some reasonably good asteroid tracking going on, and we've got about 2 months before the asteroid is actually going to hit us. We'd like to do something with the situation on the left, to avoid the situation on the right:
Well, what we really have to do is change the…
evolvingthoughts | March 18, 2008
When I was about 8, I read in a newspaper that one of my favourite short stories, "The Sentinel", by Arthur C. Clarke, was to be made into a movie by some film maker I never heard of. I had to wait 5 years to see 2001, A Space Odyssey. The last of the golden age science fiction writers, who thought that anything was possible, has died.
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2008
... sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler – Robert Frost
It was a typical hot and humid summer's day, so I entered a nice dark bluestone pub, hoping the dark would offer some cool and beer. As it was about 11 in the morning, the bar was empty save for one fellow sitting at a table - one of three next to the pool table - so I got my lager, icy cold as God intended, and went to practice my trick shots. I have found that after exactly two and a half beers, I can hit shots that professionals would blanch at, and this persists from the remaining half glass. At least once I managed to…