At Windycon, I went to a talk by Christian Ready from the Space Telescope Science Institute on the solar system and saw pictures of the surface of Titan. Wow, I didn’t realize that a probe had made a landing!
Dreaming Metal by Melissa Scott (1997).
No word cloud for this book, it isn’t on the net.
This book is a sequel to Dreamships (1992). I haven’t read Dreamships and as this book is clearly a sequel that left some gaps in this book. I didn’t know it was a sequel when I started it, but it is very clear.
That said, I enjoyed Dreaming Metal immensely. It’s one of the best written and most original books I’ve read in quite a while. The setting, an human settled world, is very interesting–complex, and yet very foreign and intriguingly different from the societies in most sf.
There is a lot that is not explained–Scott doesn’t give one of those top down explanations of the society, and the plot runs at the mid level of the society. I don’t know how much of this is covered in the first book of the series, I hope it handles it similarly. And interestingly, it’s not clear what the political system is. The characters are free to act within the plot, but there appear to be limits, different from the US, but not clear because the story isn’t about that, and the characters don’t butt up against them.
This book is about AI and music. It posits a world where AI is rare but crops up now and then, and it is considered inevitable but not predictable. It is very well written and Celinde Fortune is a great character. As described, the future of music sounds great. Also, deafness is common on Persephone, and signing and other physical performance is a integral part of the music.
Melissa Scott only wrote these two books in this universe.
RStudio, an open source IDE for R
WWF Energy Report, 100% renewables by 2050
Intellectual jokes
Books to read: Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Primers in Complex Systems) by Deborah M. Gordon
Solar energy costs at average location in US predicted to become cheaper than average electricity rates ($0.12/kWh) in 2018, as early as 2015 in the Southwest
US income growth depending on party in power From the Slog
List of software innovations
CFL bulb schematics
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer.
Great book. About parasites. What they are, the recent discovery of how big a role they have in ecosystems, how they live, how they have jumped from animal to animal, and of course, which ones afflict people.
Several chapters describe a range of human parasites in amazing and often frightening detail. From botfly larvae to liver flukes, malaria’s Plasmodium to the nematodes that parasitize humans. There is some discussion of microbial parasites, but most of the book covers metazoan parasites. Zimmer tells the stories of some of these parasites–how they find their way to people, what they do once they arrive in a new host, how they escape detection, and the course of the disease. The story of how several parasites were discovered, how they were identified and followed through their changes of form and host are told. And there are pictures!
John Scalzi, writer of science fiction and recent GOH at Capricon has an article about movies and science fiction, an often awkward pair. This is an endless topic among sf readers. Especially with movies, the nature of movie production tends to stomp the sf out of them. I still don’t think Scalzi really gets the meat of the argument.
The vital element in speculative fiction is that it raises interesting questions–predictions about the future or about whether aspects of our society are necessary or universal, just to pick two.
Star Wars is space fantasy because it eschews sf and tells a fantasy tale of adventure and superpowers. The space future setting doesn’t make it sf any more than it did for Bugs Bunny cartoons with Marvin the Martian.
The science content is not a critical aspect of sf, but it is a signifier. Good speculative fiction respects science to the extent it can while telling it’s story. It does this so the reader or viewer has a context in which to think about the ideas raised by the work. If ‘it’s all a dream’ or ‘you’ve thought about this more than the director’ is the best answer to the questions the work raises then doesn’t work as sf.
Many movies with a futurist setting ignore all the rules of the world, violating laws of nature randomly. It’s a flag that the author isn’t telling a story you are meant to think about, just an adventure romp or a horror tale. Shows like Star Trek jump back and forth across this divide–it pulls things together for a spot of speculative fiction but then retreats fantasy.
Putting web sites on phones: 1, 2
Heat pad, $14 and thermostat, $13, combine for temperature controlled water bath.
Small crudely adjustable heater, small temp. range, $8
Batch orders of custom PCBs at low cost
Natural human sleep patterns are two four hour blocks with a hour or so between them. Article
Open Library, has catalog (author, title, ISBN, etc) info available for bulk download.
Why cats paint: a theory of feline aesthetics
Interesting post on John C. McLoughlin, author of The Helix and the Sword and Toolmaker Koan, other books, speculations on the nature of dinosaurs. His book Archosauria, a new look at the old dinosaur (1979) was a head of its time.
0.005″ Thick 6″ x 50″ Stainless Steel
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Smith & Jane Austen (2009)
Great first line, it had to be polished, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
I haven’t read Jane Austen’s novel. This one I found quite enjoyable. Without zombies and katanas I suspect it would be a bit tedious. Everyone is happy in the end, except for those who deserve it and the people who turn into zombies.
