Eight Less Known Websites for SF Readers and Fans
Filed Under: Uncategorized
Everyone knows a dozen author websites to read, and the industry blogs that tell you about the latest movies and TV shows. But what if you’re interested in hearing about outlandish ideas you might pilfer for a story? Or maybe you just want a quick kick of reality-based sensawunda. What websites to do you turn to for that? Try this list for starters.
Almost solely the hard work of Paul Graham Raven, Futurismic picks up on the near-future science news faster than anyone else I read at the moment. More importantly, Futurismic is not afraid to contemplate the ramifications and implications of new tech developments. Paul has the mind of a great science fiction writer in the making, I think. I sometimes wish he’d spend less time on Futurismic and more time writing short stories.
Futurismic also features regular guest columns–one of which is by Brenda Cooper on trends in futurism. Those are well worth a read as well.
For a lapsed world traveler such as myself, Curious Expeditions is a real treat. Written by Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras , the site documents weird and obscure locations around the globe. Their fixation on cabinets of curiosities have given me many ideas for the Dr. Roundbottom project.
Their photos are always visually rich and unlike anything else you will find elsewhere. It’s a source of historical sensawunda.
Post Secret is a project in which people mail anonymous post cards with secrets in to the project creator. Each week, he posts a new batch of cards.
This one has almost nothing to do with speculative fiction exactly, but for a writer, it’s an amazing insight into the inner lives of other human beings. I always come away from the Sunday posts of secrets feeling a little more wise and a little changed by the experience. I can’t say that I’ve used any of the secrets directly in my work, but reading the site is definitely furthering my understanding of how people work in a more general sense.
The project of Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, this site brings me buckets of news about robotics and research in artificial intelligence. It does take a bit of a credibility hit by paying lip-service to the discredited “aquatic ape” theory in my opinion, but I can understand the appeal of such wacky theories. Regardless, it’s a great source of science news.
Here’s another blog by an eclectic and interesting thinker. Douglas leans left politically, so you may not be interested in his current fixation about taking the world back from corporations, but he’s been a great source for me of off-the-beaten-path economic news. About everything else, Ruskoff is interested, it seems to me, in the future of humanity. This can be a little publicity heavy at times, as he is selling a book, but when he shares an article, it’s almost always worth a read.
There have been a lot of very, very strange maps drawn throughout history. This blog brings you scans of the some of the stranger ones. Not much else to it, and that’s why I love it.
This is another simple site. It documents with photographs the unusual inventions and modifications of off-the-shelf tech in 3rd world countries. They quote William Gibson in their explanation: “The street finds its own use for things.”
Possibly a great website if you’re writing post-apocalyptic SF.
Interested in space exploration? This blog by the Tau Zero Foundation is all about that, and tangentially often about the notion of alien life. I sometimes find it an odd read, but it’s definitely rich with SF material for the writer and afficionado.
So, what are some sites that you think are good brain fodder for the SF type?
Virophage
Filed Under: Science, Speculative Fiction
Damn it, while I’m out immersing myself in the science fiction world all week at Denvention 3, science goes and spits out something truly amazing and I’m only just now reading about it. Check this out:
There is a large virus that gets sick by becoming infected by a smaller virus.
If that does not blow your mind, then nothing will.
It definitely settles the debate for me as to whether or not viruses are life. Maybe one of the definitions of life should boil down to “something that can be infected by a virus.”
On Terraforming
Filed Under: Science
On Terraforming
I wrote the below for a mailing list the other day in response to a question about whether we’re terraforming our environments for good. I liked it, so I thought I would share it with you all:
I think Americans terraform quite a bit, but they do so in a not-environmentally concious/protective ways. Grass lawns and farm fields are two good examples. Grass species that are planted on your average lawn are in no way native to America (last I checked anyway). They are foreign species, and by planting them, we have created massive artificial habitats for no reason that I can discern–what, because we think grass is pretty and it’s easy on the feet?
Farms are also a form of terraforming. We took the world’s largest continous long-grass prairie and turned it into a massive food producing ecosystem (with 1/1000th of the biodiversity, but that’s a digression) (Actually, there’s some belief that many of the grass species that we found in the midwest when whites settled had actually been semi-cultivated by native americans for a few thousand years, and some anthropologists argue that it wasn’t really a native ecosystem at that point either. This brings up lots of debates in habitat restoration that I bet Melinda knows a hell of a lot more about than I do).
As part of this, we straightened the HELL out of every river we could, which had profound effects on flooding and river ecosystems. Did you know that if it wasn’t for the Army Core of Engineers, the Mississippi would enter the Gulf of Mexico somewhere dozens (hundreds?) of miles east of where it does now? I think I read that somewhere in a book about giant engineering projects “gone wrong.”
The Army Core of Engineers almost specializes in reformatting the landscape for human purposes. However, they don’t quite do it on the scale that you are talking about, and I think the main reason is, these buffer zones that were popular to discuss after Katrina are not “cost effective” simply because they would eat up valuable real estate that MUST BE DEVELOPED, THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THERE SWAMPS! In my opinion, nothing should ever be built on a flood plain, but flood plains are real estate, the most valuable “investment” you can make in America. Damn the future, build build BUILD!
I have been collecting a lot of links regarding architecture plans for building homes that are environmentally sustainable and that become a part of the landscape instead of paving it. There may very well be a movement afoot here, but it’s in Europe, not in the land of outsourcing and service industry (here).
The big projects you see of this sort in the future are almost all going to have to do with stealing/moving fresh water around to places where we shouldn’t have built really big, water-guzzling cities (IE: anything west of the rockies, minus the Pacific Northwest). I think it’s a race over whether a massive war is going to be fought over remaining oil or remaining fresh water. Our use of it far outstrips its availability and there is serious conflict ahead (assuming someone doesn’t invent some cheap and low-energy way of desalinization or something).
Finally, I recently read a short article on Deep Sea News about how huge chunks of the ocean have effectively been aquaformed by the process of deep sea trawling. Trawling may very well be THE most ecologically damaging practice we humans continue today. It destroys thousand year old deep sea corals and other habitat-necessary organisms in a matter of minutes. Imagine a giant hand coming out of the sky and scraping your city away, and you’re close to what this does. However, in the aftermath, the process seems to make a better home for some popular and tasty fishes, and the process is probably irreversable, so there’s an argument that once a nation has destroyed their waters this way, they should just keep doing it because we won’t see a recovery in centuries, perhaps millenia.
Oh, we’re shaping the world alright, is my basic opinion. We’re just doing it in search of a short term buck and damn the future. Damn it straight to the biggest goddamn mass extinction the world has seen yet.
