A word on AI-generated content.Reader's Room: Fatal Words
Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about how to grow literature in the desert, the very real ways words can threaten life, as well as Kawamata Chiaki’s novel Death Sentences.
Show links:
- Nevada's Black Mountain Institute
- The Believer magazine
- The Believer Festival
- BMI's City of Asylum program.
- Progenitor of Surrealism, André Breton
- The Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse
- And the Twitter thread where I talk my way though an editing problem. (Warning: Several swear words.)
Reader's Room: Turning The Corner
Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about autonomous vehicles, and how they're still a nuisance on the road if they can't communicate with the humans around them. We also talk about what causes car crashes in professional races, using AI to keep people and sharks safe from each other, and Karin Tidbeck’s powerful short story collection, Jagannath.
Show links:
- Las Vegas's autonomous shuttle.
- The giant, fire breathing mantis at Container Park.
- Linkdump:
- Studying car crashes in Formula One Racing suggests that competitiveness is more likely to cause crashes than skill or weather.
- The 2018 Hugo Award nominations are out. Good source of ideas for more for reading, watching, and listening.
- Australian beaches are looking to protect swimmers from sharks using AI linked to buoys and drones to sense sharks in the water.
Reader's Room: Extending Yourself
The Reader's Room talks about speculative fiction, science, and technology. This month, we ask what kinds of changes you might make to your body to improve your work, or better reflect your beliefs.
We also talk about the transhumans in Alistair Reynolds' new book, Elysium Fire, and his 2008 book The Prefect, as well as some of the people and technology taking us forward.
Show Links:
- Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space stories
- Diving for ancient ivory under the Bering Sea at the Anchorage Daily News
- Actress Angel Guiffria
- Elastic, self repairing sensors at Quartz.
Reader's Room: When One Thing Changes
This month we talk about the possibilities of making a single change in reality, and I get caught up on Charles Stross's Laundry Files novels.
Show links:
- The Atrocity Archives, Stross's first Laundry Files book.
- The Delirium Brief, the most recent novel in the series.
- Laundry Files Reading Order
- MIT's Neuron on a chip at MIT's media site.
- Rab the Giant versus the Witch of the Waterfall at Fireside Fiction
- ‘Atomic Bill’ and the Birth of the Bomb at undark.org, explores the ethics of the New York Times star reporter hired by the Manhattan Project to chronicle and cheerlead the nuclear age.
Reader's Room: Building Worlds
Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the month. This edition we look at how and why authors create specilatve worlds, and their impact on storytelling.
Show links:
- We talk about Andy Weir's latest book, Artemis.
- If you have an hour, Weir did an interview about the process of creating Artemis on Conversations with Tyler on Medium. (Both audio and transcript.)
- If you only have five minutes, he also did an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday in November. (Audio and text excerpts.)
- Charlie Jane Anders wrote the excellent, The Seven Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding, on her site, io9. It’s a few years old, but it all remains true. A good read for writers, but it'll also give readers some tools to figure out why they love or hate a story world.
- Imaginary Worlds is a bi-weekly podcast all about world building. It explores everything from author’s creation to fandom. I've mentioned it before, but it's a great resource for getting behind the scenes of your favorite creations, and learning to appreciate entirely new things.