Fantasy/SciFi

From BookRiot:

Hey, you. You’re finally awake…and just in time to read about the most iconic fantasy characters we’ve ever been graced with. Buckle in for some good old nostalgia as I walk you down memory lane to honor these fantasy greats.

What makes a fantasy character iconic? Seriously, I’m asking. Is it the instant name recognition of a Frodo Baggins or a Kvothe? The epic story of a Fang Runin or a Queen Talyien? The memeability of a Tyrion “I Drink and I Know Things” Lannister or a Cloud “Did Sephiroth… Do This” Strife?

That’s a really roundabout way of saying that each of the characters on this list is iconic for a different reason. Many owe their icon status to a non-book medium, such as a TV or movie series. One or two have never been in books at all, but have still managed to leave a lasting impression on nerd culture — and likely inspired a fun literary homage or two in the process.

As you might imagine, these aren’t necessarily the strongest, smartest, or most beloved characters out there. This isn’t a contest to see who would win in a fight. It’s about who has reached True Icon Status™…whatever that means.

Below, the most iconic fantasy characters of all time.

. . . .

Bilbo

Speaking of delighting fantasy fans for decades, let’s talk about Bilbo Baggins. The hero — and original author — of The Hobbit first appeared in print during the Great Depression, making him the oldest character on this list by far. A lot of us slept on Bilbo for too long, but honestly? This ambivert is totes relatable, and his penchant for pragmatism makes him a truly wonderful — and devious — fantasy icon.

. . . .

Falkor

OK, let’s be honest: who didn’t want to take a ride on Falkor’s back after watching The Neverending Story as a kid? Fans who haven’t had the chance to read Michael Ende’s 1979 novel will be happy to learn that the only Luck Dragon in existence is just as delightful in the original book, where he’s known as Fuchur. So here’s to Falkor — for inspiring our dreams and helping us believe in luck for close to 50 years.

. . . .

Inigo Montoya

The entire cast of The Princess Bride is utterly iconic, but Inigo Montoya has the fantasy icon trifecta: determination, a tortured backstory, and kickass sword skills. Then there’s actor Mandy Patinkin’s signature line from the 1984 film — “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” — which is equal parts memorable and memeable. 10/10. No notes.

Link to the rest at BookRiot

From Jane Friedman:

Choosing good comparable titles can be a brain-busting challenge for many writers. Comps let agents and publishers know where your book fits in the marketplace, and they’re helpful in crafting a publicity strategy. But it can be hard to find books that feel like an exact match, especially if you’re writing fiction and your novel doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.

That was the case with Shaken Loose, my debut fantasy novel set in an unjust and unraveling Hell. During the long march to its recent publication, I came up with the idea of a Book Family Tree—an exercise that helped me better understand my own book and where it fit in the world.

It was not only enlightening but fun! So I made a free template that allows other writers to easily create family trees for their own books.

But first, some background.

While querying agents and publishers, I spent countless hours brainstorming potential comps while never feeling that any single one was a perfect match. Shaken Loose challenges organized religion like The Golden Compass, but it doesn’t have that book’s epic sweep; it features nuanced characters with existential dilemmas like The Golem and The Jinni but it isn’t historical fantasy. The landscape and backstory of its Hell are modeled on Paradise Lost, but clearly a 350-year-old poem isn’t a useful comp.

My book had an identity crisis. Or maybe the crisis was mine: I didn’t know where it belonged.

I’m a genealogy hobbyist as well as a writer, so I started playing around with the idea of creating a family tree for my book. If Shaken Loose had parents, who would they be? How about its grandparents? Its cousins?

This turned out to be a great deal of fun. It helped me think more broadly about the influences on my book and identify works that might not be an exact match but were still related.

With a family tree, I could list Paradise Lost as a grandparent—part of my book’s DNA, a foundational influence although vastly different in structure, perspective, and style. As parents, I chose an extremely odd couple—The Wizard of Oz and The Road—that expressed the book’s upbeat “quest for home” plot but also its vein of gritty darkness.

The “cousin” part of the tree was where I placed books that were actual comp candidates—recent upmarket fantasy like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. This was a reassuring way for me to think about comps: Cousins share a lot of traits, but no one expects them to be as similar as siblings. Certainly no one expects them to be identical twins.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From Book Riot:

I grew up on Star Wars, so you can imagine that science fiction, space fantasy, and science fiction romance have a special place in my heart. After all, what is Star Wars if not an epic science fiction love story? (Don’t try to fight me on this.) There’s just something about the combination of science fiction elements — you know, epic space battles, intergalactic political intrigue — and romance that work together to create the sense of a love story of epic proportions. Maybe it’s the grand scale of space or the stakes that are so often involved, with entire planets and civilizations dependent on the hero’s actions. Either way, I just can’t get enough.

But it seems like finding really good science fiction romance isn’t always as easy. Maybe it’s because I’m looking for that Han and Leia tier romance (see The Princess and the Scoundrel below) full of banter and complicated feelings and the highest of high stakes. When that’s your standard, it’s no wonder a lot of love stories fall short. But these 10 science fiction romance books (Han and Leia included) deliver on the feels in a big way, even if the stakes aren’t always quite as high as battling an evil empire.

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard

A pirate and a captured scavenger enter into a marriage of convenience in this gorgeous sci-fi romance. For Xích Si, this marriage will offer her the protection of the Red Banner, and in return, she agrees to help the mindship Rice Fish uncover who was behind the murder of her late wife, the Red Scholar. But though they both enter into this as nothing more than a business arrangement, their feelings for each other soon grow. As threats from both inside and outside of the pirate banners begin to circle, they must decide just how much they’re willing to give up to be with the ones who matter most.

The Red Scholar’s Wake is set in Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, and while it can absolutely be read as a standalone, you might also enjoy the many other novellas, short stories, and novels set in this world of mind ships and vibrant Vietnamese and Chinese inspired cultures.

The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

Inspired by the lives of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, The Stars Undying tells the story of a princess who has lost everything to a civil war and the commander of an interstellar empire. If Gracia can win over Commander Matheus Ceirran and his right-hand officer, Anita, she might just be able to win back the throne and the computer containing the soul of the planet’s immortal god. But attempting to bed an Imperial commander is as dangerous as any battle, and if Gracia wants to regain her planet, she’ll have to become a queen the likes of which the universe has never seen before.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

From Electric Lit:

When I sat down to write Users five years ago, I had no intention of writing a particularly topical novel. At the time, a story about a lead creative working at a VR start-up who goes to war with his user-community, whose hasty solution ultimately leads to his downfall, felt like an exaggeration—a hyperbolic expression of fears and dissatisfactions that were bubbling up in me after going to work as a writer in a variety of tech settings. But, with the rise of web3, and the scramble by major corporations from Microsoft to Alphabet to Facebook to wrap us in their virtual or augmented nets, it’s starting to feel like reality has caught up to the exaggeration. I wish I could claim it was intentional, but I have trouble predicting what will happen in the next few hours, let alone several years.

When I write, I’m often using my imagination to process an immediate world that would otherwise be overwhelming. I think that’s one great power fiction has, and part of why I’ve always been drawn to it. Intentionally prescient or not, I’ve always turned to writers for depictions of life, not only as it is, but as it could be, or will be, that make the living of life feel a bit more manageable. That’s a tall order, given the past decade. And the future has started to feel more unpredictable than ever. But here’s a list of books about the future that make those distant (or not-so-distant) days feel a bit less daunting—either in the way they imagine the future or in the way its being imagined is made meaningful.

Out There: Stories by Kate Folk

Weird how writers called “weird” wind up predicting the future with what feels retroactively like utter clarity. A woman is tasked with keeping her house moist. Another must navigate a world of online dating full of artificial men called “blots” distributed by Russian hackers. Folk writes stories about the future in a way that feels both absurd and inevitable, which is what the future always is.

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

In the last few years, Serpell has put out two powerhouse novels. Most recently, the breathtaking and grief-soaked The Furrows. Before that, her massive speculative sci-fi debut The Old Drift. This is a multi-generational tale about a colonial settlement in Zambia that starts in 1904, where a mistake alters the course of generations for decades to come. We witness the rise of the charismatic huckster behind a homegrown technological movement called the Afronauts, traveling from riverside mosquito tents to a world of microdrones and viral vaccines.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From The Economist:

Vultures do not have an enviable reputation. The upside, from their perspective, is that they can survive on carrion that would poison most other animals. “Knowing to savour bowels and maggoty flesh,” each scavenger that swoops into Kevin Jared Hosein’s novel is “hated by the world that it will eventually eat”.

. . . .

Ghosts, it turns out, have similar powers. The dead consume the living much as vultures devour corpses. Grief engulfs people, resentments harden and trauma echoes across generations. The ravenous ghosts in Mr Hosein’s novel are spectres of the Indian labourers shipped to Trinidad to toil on sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery in 1833. Along with their offspring they haunt the dilapidated barracks on the island’s defunct estates.

Mr Hosein joins a line of Indian-Trinidadian writers, including V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon, who have grappled with the country’s history of indentured labour. He connects this past to Trinidad today. “Passage”, his short story of 2018, told of a Trinidadian family who illegally cremated a dead child in the early 2000s. “Hungry Ghosts” darts back to the 1940s to explore the ancient Indian mythology that underpins such rituals. The narrative unfolds in a sugar-cane barrack, beside a river “black with the ashes of babies”.

The ghost of Hema Saroop, an infant cremated by her mother, Shweta, after dying from a waterborne disease, leads a cast of immaterial characters. She is “a preta—a hungry ghost”, her spirit cursed with an insatiable appetite. She eats her mother so ferociously that Shweta never utters her daughter’s name again. But the baby still hungers for company, and brings other ghosts with her.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Atlantic:

Computer games, like movies, music, and television, are part of our culture and often reflect our fears and worries—especially about the end of the world. And I’ve been playing them for years.

Nuclear War and Zombies

Computer games get a bad rap among those who do not play them. People associate them, at worst, with adolescent violence (despite lack of conclusive evidence for that theory) or, more benignly, with creepy nerds in Mom’s basement, yelling into their headsets and jabbing at keyboards while wiping Cheetos dust off their glasses.

Well, I am a happily married 62-year-old professional, and I play computer games. In fact, I have been playing them since the dawn of the personal-computing age. Yes, games are part of the escape from reality that my colleague Megan Garber wrote about in her cover story for the March issue of the magazine, but they’re also a perfectly reasonable hobby.

Still, you might ask why a grown man with a busy life—or, you know, any life—would waste precious hours in front of a screen. At the risk of handing a rationalization to students who have not finished their homework, I will say that I not only enjoy the process of playing but also find that games enhance my productivity rather than destroy it. I play computer games for the same reason I play golf: The engrossing requirement to complete a set of objectives clears my mind. When I return from the golf course or close the game program, my brain has been shaken and cleared like an old Etch A Sketch, and I’m ready to work again.

Even pointless games can be relaxing (especially if they’re visually pretty), such as the “loot and shoot” adventures in which you kill something and take its money or possessions, over and over again. And sometimes, you just want to roll your army over some hapless Roman commander or drag space bandits through an asteroid field. But my favorites are the games that have intricate plots, because many of them are cultural markers that reveal what fascinates us—and more important, what scares us.

Back in the 1980s, for example, Americans wrestled with fears about World War III. So did games. I have spent my entire career studying war and nuclear weapons, and for me, roaming around in a destroyed world is much like going to horror or disaster movies, or reading fairy tales (which are really scary if you think about most of them): It’s a way of processing fear.

Consider Trinity, a 1986 text-based game. (Early computers had no serious graphics capability, so these games instead required you to read quite a bit and then issue commands and solve puzzles.) In Trinity, nuclear war breaks out at the beginning of the game; the player escapes through a portal and must tumble backwards through time all the way to the Trinity nuclear test site in 1945 in order to sabotage the first atomic bomb, thus preventing the nuclear-arms race and the eventual war.

Thematically, this was not exactly a game for children. Nor were the many games that followed it, including the 1988 classic Wasteland, in which the player must lead a team of Desert Rangers through the ruins of the Southwest to discover the source of a new threat that could finish the job of annihilating humanity. These games followed a spate of Cold War movies and music shot through with nuclear anxieties, such as WarGames, Red Dawn, The Day After, and Testament; you could play Trinity or Wasteland while listening to “99 Luftballons,” by Nena, or “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work, and spend a cozy afternoon traipsing through Armageddon. (Nuclear war is back: One game studio just released a highly detailed nuclear-conflict simulator, but I haven’t played it. Yet.)

As the nuclear threat receded and threats to our health, such as AIDS, began to dominate our fears, pop culture—including games—spoke to those fears. Biohazards became a dominant theme in gaming, with mad scientists and big corporations mucking about with our DNA, weird pathogens, doors to alternate dimensions, or even the gates to hell itself, all in the name of profit, while unleashing freaks and mutants on the rest of us.

The granddaddy of the biohazard-genre games, Resident Evil, was released in 1996 and led to several more games and movies; the first motion picture in the franchise debuted in 2002 and was followed by five more sequels and then a 2021 reboot. Last month, HBO premiered a new series, The Last of Us, based on a highly regarded game of the same name. It is set in a world where a fungus has turned most people into crazed zombies, and so far, like the game, it’s a hit.

. . . .

It is natural to be fascinated by the ramifications of global catastrophe, but the best games present the player with difficult moral choices and awful, sometimes unavoidable dilemmas. 

Link to the rest at The Atlantic and thanks to F. for the tip.

PG notes that the OP is an academic paper, but found it quite engaging. Following is the authors’ abstract of the longer paper.

This article uncovers the role of patents and patent law in shaping the literary genre of science fiction. Using unpublished primary sources, the article examines the views of Hugo Gernsback, the so-called “father” of science fiction. Gernsback, who was himself an inventor and frequent patentee, is known for his firm conviction that works of science fiction can give rise to the technologies of the future. This article reveals that, in espousing this thesis, Gernsback drew an explicit analogy between the inventions described in science fiction and the inventions described in patents. The culmination of Gernsback’s theory was his proposal, in 1952, that “Provisional Patents” should be available for “feasible and technically sound” inventions depicted in works of science fiction—even if they were not yet possible to implement in practice. The history of patent law’s role in shaping science fiction has been largely ignored, or derided, by the science fiction community. It is wholly unknown to the patent law community. Many will find Gernsback’s proposal deeply problematic from the perspective of patent policy. But investigating Gernsback’s views, and understanding his justifications for them, generates many surprising insights about patent law and policy, and about the genre of science fiction itself.

Science fiction’s patent law origin provides a new and different justification for science fiction’s role in society. According to Gernsback, and other adherents of his philosophy like Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction is not just a form of entertainment. It is a legitimate component of innovation policy. Without science fiction, society would not have many of the innovations that surround us today—or at least would not have obtained them so quickly. This is extremely similar to the role that many commentators ascribe to patents. Gernsback’s philosophy of science fiction may seem naïve. But these beliefs, and their underlying reliance on patent theory, were nonetheless highly influential. They shaped the genre of science fiction as we know it.

The patent law community, and not just those of us who are science fiction fans, also has a lot to learn from Gernsback’s views. The historical connection between science fiction and patent law forces us to take a hard look at one of patent law’s most deeply-held principles—that patents are only available for inventions that are currently possible. On the one hand, Gernsback’s extreme position reaffirms why this principle is important. It should not be easy to control the future. The law wisely incorporates doctrines that make it hard to patent inventions that are still so many years away that we call them mere science fiction. At the same time, however, Gernsback’s insistence that science fiction is important for innovation sheds light on the countless “non-enabled,” totally “incredible” visions of the future that patent law leaves out. Science fictional inventions, precisely because they are not yet possible, can impart useful information, and inspire future inventors, in ways that patents cannot. One of the most important differences between science fiction and patents, in fact, is that people actually read science fiction, and are deeply moved by it. Gernsback, as usual, put it best. Science fiction imparts “knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware that we are being taught.” It “fires the reader’s imagination more perhaps than anything else of which we know.” Very few people can say that about reading patents.

This matters. If Gernsback was right—and as we show, in some cases he certainly was—then science fiction has inspired some of the inventions we have today. And it did so precisely because it failed patent law requirements like enablement and operable utility, describing inventions which the author could imagine but had no idea how to put into practice. We cannot perform a meaningful empirical assessment of science fiction’s impact on innovation. But we do have evidence that some inventions, and many patents, were influenced to some degree by science fiction.

Hrdy, Camilla Alexandra and Brean, Daniel Harris, The Patent Law Origins of Science Fiction (December 1, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4291271 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4291271

From Patentlyo.com:

Are inventions described in works of science fiction patentable? The answer is usually no, and for good reason. Some of the most beloved fixtures of the genre—time machines, faster-than-light space travel, teleportation, downloading memories, copying a consciousness, etcetera—are impossible or not yet possible when described by the author. This sort of science fiction is not patentable because it cannot logically be enabled or have credible utility when the patent is filed.

For similar reasons, science fiction is rarely cited as prior art against later patent filings. Science fiction can qualify as prior art under § 102(a) as a “printed publication” or as “otherwise available to the public.” It can be especially useful as “obviousness” prior art because, to quote the Federal Circuit, a “reference that does not provide an enabling disclosure for a particular claim limitation may nonetheless furnish the motivation to combine, and be combined with, another reference in which that limitation is enabled.” Raytheon Techs. Corp. v. General Electric Company,. . .. However, science fiction is unlikely to be cited during examination. Examiners lack the time and energy to search for on-point science fiction where there is so much more (and better catalogued) prior art among patents and scientific publications. Applicants, for their part, are not required to disclose prior art that is not material to patentability or that is cumulative of other prior art they’ve already provided.

. . . .

It may surprise you, then, to learn that the genre of science fiction is deeply indebted to patent law and patent theory. In our new paper, The Patent Law Origins of Science Fiction, . . . we show that science fiction as a literary form was originally premised on the idea that works of science fiction are like patents. They disclose useful technical information that can give readers a “stimulus” to perfect the invention and figure out how to make it work.

The person responsible for this comparison was the so-called “father” of science fiction, Hugo Gernsback. He started the first exclusively-science fiction magazine, called Amazing Stories, in 1926. The Hugo awards, given to the best works of science fiction and fantasy writing, are named after him.

Gernsback was also an inventor and serious scientific thinker in his own right. He died with over thirty patents to his name. In the early 1900s, he started a radio and electronics equipment company in New York. To support his business, he initially published catalogs for mail-order electrical components, but the catalogs soon morphed into full-sized magazines with titles like “Modern Electrics,” marketed to inventors and amateur “tinkerers.” . . . . His magazines were full of information about patents and advice on patenting—which Gernsback deemed an essential step in the commercial success of any new invention.

At first, Gernsback started publishing science fiction stories—which he then called “scientifiction”—to fill space in his electrical magazines. These stories were sometimes little more than a few paragraphs of exposition about some speculative new device that might be used in the future, plugged into a generic adventure plot. For example, one story featured a genius from the future using (what we now call) “radar” to track down a Martian who had kidnapped the protagonist’s love interest in a Space Flyer. Despite the fictional elements, science and scientific plausibility were still all-important. Gernsback was fond of saying the recipe for good scientifiction was 25% science and 75% literature.

Readers loved it, and Amazing Stories was born. Gernsback knew he was on to something, and he frequently published editorials expounding on the virtues of scientifiction. These editorials, along with his unpublished manuscripts, reveal Gernsback’s theory that a good science fiction story is like a patent, but a much more “palatable” read. Although he did not articulate it in precisely the same terms, Gernsback’s justification for scientifiction echoes the language of patent law’s disclosure theory. Scientifiction, he wrote, provides both knowledge and “stimulus.” It inspires “seriously-minded” readers to learn about science and technology, and it supplies the “inventor or inventor-to-be who reads the story” with “an incentive” to “realiz[e] the author’s ambition” by perfecting the author’s science fictional inventions in the real world. Gernsback often drew the analogy to patents quite explicitly. The science fiction author, in his framework, was “an original inventor,” like the named inventor on a patent. The readers who got the author’s invention to work were like “manufacturers” who buy patents and commercialize the inventions therein “with but a few changes.” They were just there to profit from the author’s grand ambitions.

Over time, Gernsback developed a crazy idea. If science fiction authors are “inventors” who inspire others to reduce their inventions to practice, then shouldn’t science fiction authors be able to get patents for their prescient descriptions of future inventions? And shouldn’t science fiction serve as prior art against other peoples’ patents? In 1952, just after Congress had modernized the Patent Act, Gernsback made these ideas public. In a speech he gave to the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, he proposed that Congress should reform patent law (again) to give science fiction authors the ability to apply for “Provisional Patents.”

Gernsback’s Provisional Patents were not at all like today’s provisional patent applications. . . . His Provisional Patents would have given science fiction authors thirty extra years in which to demonstrate their science fictional inventions worked. If they could do so, the Provisional Patent would be converted into a normal patent, presumably in force for the full patent term (which at that time meant 17 years). Otherwise, it would be abandoned. This proposal was not adopted and, we presume, was never seriously considered.

In the same speech, Gernsback also proposed that authors and publishers should start identifying works of science fiction that contained “new and feasible” inventions, so that they could send these selected works to the patent office. Gernsback’s hope was that the patent office would be deluged with science fiction and have no choice but to start reviewing and citing science fiction more often as prior art. This idea had more grounding in current law than Gernsback’s Provisional Patents, but it was not adopted either. Mechanisms for getting prior art to the patent office have certainly improved since Gernsback’s time. But we still don’t send the patent office curated collections of science fiction.

. . . .

Gernsback’s ideas were iconoclastic, and his proposal to make Provisional Patents available for inventions that are not yet reduced to practice is deeply troubling from a policy perspective. Science fiction authors who make reasonably accurate predictions about future technological developments would gain the ability to sue the very people who figure out how to make those technologies. Imagine the effect on the computer industry if a science fiction author had been able to reserve the right to patent a supercomputer in the early 1920s, and then converted this into a full patent in the 1950s…

But taking Gernsback’s ideas seriously generates some surprising insights. Science fiction—of the type that Gernsback and “hard sf” writers like Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov wrote—has more in common with patents than it might seem. Publishing a work of science fiction confers no exclusive rights on the inventions it contains. But, like patents, works of science fiction are documents that disclose potentially useful information about science and technology. Like patents, science fiction stories can describe inventions that have not literally been reduced to practice; they can leave many details to skilled artisans to figure out. Both science fiction readers and patent examiners are also supposed to suspend disbelief, presuming the inventions described on the page are based on plausible scientific principles. . . . If we think patents are an important part of the innovation ecosystem because they disseminate useful technological teachings and insights, then science fiction might be too.

How often science fiction influences innovation is an extremely interesting question. Ironically, the patent record itself is a great source of data with which to test Gernsback’s theories. In fact, one of Gernsback’s more questionable assumptions was that profit-hungry readers are “continuously” filing patents on inventions they learned about in science fiction. They remember the idea, “lard it with a few of [their] own, patent it and start a new billion dollar industry on it.” Regardless of whether that is true, if someone is inspired by science fiction to make an invention in the real world, then we should sometimes see evidence of this in the patent record.

Formal prior art citations to science fiction are rare for the reasons we said above. But we can find circumstantial evidence of science fiction’s influence by searching patents. For example, specifications sometimes reference science fiction in the body, even if they don’t formally cite to science fiction as prior art. Search the patent record for “Asimov, “Three Laws of Robotics,” or “Star Trek,” and you’ll see what we mean. We can also find more direct evidence of influence—situations where inventors expressly state that they got their inspiration from science fiction. For this, though, we usually have to look outside the patent record. Inventors’ autobiographies, interviews, speeches, and marketing efforts can reveal clues. For example, Neil Stephenson’s 1992 book Snow Crash features a virtual world called the Metaverse. Facebook and other tech companies are making their own virtual worlds and calling them by the same name. That, along with direct statements from employees that Stephenson is “our inspiration,” helps support that there was some degree of influence. Steven Levy, Neal Stephenson Named the Metaverse. Now, He’s Building It, Wired (Sept. 16, 2022).

Link to the rest at Patentlyo.com and thanks to C. for the tip.

PG notes that the OP includes many links he has removed. However, PG didn’t hit a paywall when he clicked on the link, so, if your OCD is kicking up, you should be able to go to the OP, click on the links and learn much more.

From The Wall Street Journal:

This year has swung a wide arc through the world of speculative fiction, from alternate-earth kaiju to ghost mushrooms. While it was hard to select just five, this year’s “best of” has something for everyone: horror, aliens, folktale fantasies, dystopia and an anthology of shorts for our newly reduced attention spans.

In his introduction to the Macmillan Collector’s Library “Classic Science Fiction Stories,” Adam Roberts does a masterful job of retelling the history of the genre in the introduction, focusing on how it’s an older form than most people understand.

It’s his choice of stories that really distinguishes this anthology from others. There are some beloved classics like “The Colour Out of Space,” but most casual readers of science fiction will probably not have read Voltaire’s “Micromégas.” “Sultana’s Dream” is a fascinating utopian tale about a society with flying cars by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali feminist from the turn of the last century. And even serious fans of science fiction’s Golden Age may not know about the short but profound career of Stanley Weinbaum, represented here by his groundbreaking “A Martian Odyssey.”

This is a forever book, a beautiful little volume—complete with gilt on the page edges and a bookmark ribbon—to dip into whenever you’re feeling the need for wonder, nostalgia and a fresh look at a favorite genre.

Readers may remember “Leech” by Hiron Ennes from just a couple of weeks ago: In the far future, an evolved parasite, a biological distributed consciousness, controls all the human doctors and humanity’s remaining medical knowledge. The hero is a single point of view of this parasite who must solve the mystery of why one of its hosts killed itself. The brilliant narration from a single iteration of the parasite’s hosts puts “Leech” on the year’s short list. Also a must-read for horror aficionados, especially those who prefer tentacles.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Book Riot:

If you’re a fan of all things Middle-earth, here’s your opportunity to spend the night in the famous Hobbiton. AirBNB is offering three people the chance to win an overnight at The Shire’s New Zealand filming location in March 2023. Although the site has always been open to visitors, this experience is new in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Hobbit‘s first film.

. . . .

The Shire’s decor was put together by Brian Massey, designer behind Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. If you are one of the lucky winners, you’ll get to spend those nights among a lovely book nook and be within walking distance of Green Dragon Inn, which serves Southfarthing beer and cider.

. . . .

In addition to the stay, the three lucky winners will get first-class Hobbit treatment to include:

• Private access to a personal Hobbit Hole, set up for relaxing moments of Preciousss™ downtime and afternoon tea.
• An evening banquet in The Green Dragon Inn with a feast featuring beef and ale stew, whole roast chickens, freshly baked breads and plenty of ale, plus Second Breakfast™ and Elevenses™ served daily.
• A behind-the-scenes private tour of Hobbiton Movie Set to explore the makings of the trilogies.

Link to the rest at Book Riot

Lots of photos at the OP.

From Esquire:

It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a fan. For devotees of mega-franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s never been a more massive glut of new content. We’re living through a golden age of interconnected storytelling, as sequels and prequels explode across film, television, and literature faster than many of us can keep up. Yet at the same time, these mega-franchises are tormented by their most strident fans, melting down into paroxysms of toxicity through petitions, review bombing, and targeted harassment campaigns, among other odious tactics. Toxic fandom is a complex beast, but at the root of its many convulsions, there’s often one sore spot: the sticky concept of canon.

Canon is scripture; canon is king; canon can do no wrong. Its definition is simple—the term refers to a fictional body of work and its established facts—but that’s where the simplicity ends. In this age of massive cultural production, of sequels and prequels and cinematic universes, where does canon start and stop? Do novelizations, video games, or other ancillaries count—and who gets to decide? When new entries to the canon subvert or “retcon” the established universe, what’s to be done with those unruly fictions? After all, when storytellers dare to expand canon, whether by disrupting the narrative or simply shining a flashlight into its underexplored corners, there can be hell to pay. Increasingly, fans have become canon’s militant enforcers; when those seeking to enlarge canon stray across its perceived guardrails, like J.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson, backlash is swift and vociferous. In one memorable dust-up, Star Wars fans petitioned for Disney to erase The Last Jedi from the franchise’s canon altogether. Somehow, canon is at once a collective orthodoxy and a personal totem, inflected with each viewer’s own biases and desires—even their own bigotry, too.

Canon has a big problem, and the call is coming from inside the house. It’s not hard to see how this obsession with canonical fealty has hamstrung Marvel and Lucasfilm, two franchise juggernauts whose every innovation is punished by a fan meltdown. When storytellers are held hostage by their own audiences, it undermines their ability to do what artists do best: explore, revise, play. This is the problem with storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise—all too often, the impulses of abiding canon conflict with the impulses of making art. As Ron Moore, a longtime Star Trek writer who later rebooted Battlestar Galactica, put it, “It’s frustrating to be in the writers room and tossing out stories, then having to stop yourself and go, ‘Does this work? Does this violate continuity?’ And having to call people and check encyclopedias and look up information. You want to have it all in your head and just play. The Trek universe has got to the point where you can’t play anymore.”

How can storytellers possibly play or progress under the weight of all that baggage—and still please today’s demanding audiences, too? Some mega-franchises have found a solution where canon isn’t a restriction, but rather, a foundation. If fans won’t accept stories where canon makes less sense, then by God, these shows will bring the canon to make more sense.

. . . .

Consider Strange New Worlds, Paramount+’s sensational Star Trek prequel set during the captaincy of Christopher Pike, who preceded Captain Kirk aboard the Enterprise. Fans of The Original Series no doubt remember the landmark two-part episode “The Menagerie,” which shocked viewers when Spock abducted his former commander Captain Pike and stole the Enterprise, risking his life and career to transport a paralyzed Pike to a forbidden planet. It’s a fantastic episode, but it lacks a backstory. Just what sort of bond existed between these two men that drove rule-following Spock to steal Starfleet’s flagship?

Link to the rest at Esquire

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Thanks to Felix, who suggests Tesla developed Optimus to, “discourage unionization or, more likely, to address ‘the shortage of skilled labor: the first units are going into TESLA factories.'”

From National Public Radio:

J.K. Rowling, who rose to fame as the author of the Harry Potter series, is known for writing about magical subjects and fantasy worlds. But her latest book bears more than a passing resemblance to reality — and, critics say, not in a good way.

The Ink Black Heart is the sixth installment of Rowling’s thriller series Cormoran Strike, which she penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The 1,024-page tome started raising eyebrows as soon as it hit stores on Tuesday.

Observers noted that the plot appears to mirror Rowling’s own experience of taking heat and losing fans for expressing transphobic views in recent years. Rowling has said publicly that the book was not based on her own life, even though some of the events that take place in the story did in fact happen to her as she was writing it.

“Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were [like] – are you clairvoyant?” Rowling wrote in a Q&A on Galbraith’s website. “I wasn’t clairvoyant, I just – yeah, it was just one of those weird twists. Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like.”

. . . .

The book centers the story of Edie Ledwell, a popular cartoonist who, according to the official description, is “persecuted by a mysterious online figure” — and ultimately found dead — after her cartoon was criticized for being racist, ableist and transphobic (at least partly over a bit involving “a hermaphrodite worm,” Rolling Stone reports).

“The book takes a clear aim at ‘social justice warriors’ and suggests that Ledwell was a victim of a masterfully plotted, politically fueled hate campaign against her,” the magazine continues, adding that the character gets doxxed — with “photos of her home plastered on the Internet” — and faces threats of rape and death because of her opinions.

. . . .

Rowling said in November that she’s received death threats. She also publicly accused three activists of doxxing her when they posted photos of themselves holding pro-trans rights signs outside of her house in Scotland, “carefully positioning themselves to ensure that our address was visible,” she said.

. . . .

Lark Malakai Gray, co-host of the queer Harry Potter podcast “The Gayly Prophet” told NPR over email that he finds the situation “deeply embarrassing” for Rowling.

“She has published a 1,000-page self-insert fanfiction where she’s the victim—it’s the kind of behavior that you’d expect from a petulant teenager, not a grown adult with immense wealth and power,” he added. “I have no idea what she expected, but seeing the internet fill with jokes about the book has been an absolute joy after all the harm she has caused my community over the past several years.”

Link to the rest at National Public Radio

From Writer Unboxed:

As I hurtle toward the publication of my debut, it struck me the other day that I’ve spent over a decade crafting an elaborate 1,500+ page setup. It’s true. In 2011, after two years of collecting rejections for my first epic fantasy story, I convinced myself that the only thing keeping me from a publishing deal was that my story lacked an engaging opening (reader, this was not the only thing). I must have tried two dozen new openings before I had the not-so-original idea that led to the following ten years, and ultimately to this moment.

I’m not sure which came first, my interest in a deeper exploration of the backstory of the deceased father of my protagonist brothers, or the idea that his story could become the new entry point into my story-world. Whether it was the publishing chicken or the storytelling egg that came first, I embarked on what I then supposed would be a quick and easy novella. About a year later, I had a 180K word shitty first draft about the entire life of not just the father of the brothers, but also of the guardian who became the love of his life and the mother of another key player in Epic #1. The rest, as they say, is history—in this case, quite literally.

Yep, I stumbled into becoming a generational storyteller. In hindsight, I consider it a fortuitous stumble. In the years since that shitty first draft, I’ve sought to shape a more meaningful trilogy from the epic tale of the first generation, and I look forward to moving back, into the future of book four, to reengage with the next generation. Let’s take a deeper look at the phenomenon of generational storytelling, shall we? Whether you’ve done any generational storytelling or not, you might discover an angle you’d like to utilize in future works.

Beyond Lineage

Hidden lineage reveals are certainly nothing new to epic SFF. I mean, “Luke, I am your father,” anyone? “This… is Isildur’s heir?” also springs to mind. There have been scores of stories in which we learn something about the ancestry of characters that was previously veiled, and I’ve enjoyed many of them. I’ve used the trope myself, in a less prominent fashion. But I’m talking about something more.

I just finished reading Jade Legacy, which is book three of The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee (I’m still recovering, but I think I’ll be all right, thanks). The series is amazing, full of magic and martial arts, set in a mafia-style empire, but at its core, the story is a family saga. We meet the generation of the primary characters as they come of age and step into leadership roles, struggling to live up to expectations born of their famous sires, who decades earlier became insurgents to thrust off the yoke of a despotic foreign occupation. The success and ascendance of those sires, known as Green Bone warriors, comes primarily through their unique (but costly) ability to utilize a magical and empowering element (jade) found only on their home island.

. . . .

I quickly became enthralled by the progeny—the fourth generation to appear in the saga—as they too come of age. It’s just so fascinating to consider which gifts and limitations they were born with, what they learned, and how each of them reacts so differently to their generational circumstance. The parents’ response to their children is just as fascinating. The genius is in coming to feel as though you’ve known these characters almost all of their lives. I’m convinced that the generational aspect took the series to another level of brilliance.

Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed

From Unherd:

Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner, did not live to enjoy his Hollywood success. He died on March 2, 1982, three months before the film was released.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

Link to the rest at Unherd

From Quanta Magazine:

Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice — say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5 — and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches.

In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers. If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers. But if they were offered 20 candy bars, including a Snickers, the choice became less clear. They would sometimes pick something other than the Snickers, even though it was still their favorite. When Glimcher would remove all the choices except the Snickers and the selected candy, participants would wonder why they hadn’t chosen their favorite.

Economists have spent more than 50 years cataloging irrational choices like these. Nobel Prizes have been earned; millions of copies of Freakonomics have been sold. But economists still aren’t sure why they happen. “There had been a real cottage industry in how to explain them and lots of attempts to make them go away,” said Eric Johnson, a psychologist and co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University. But none of the half-dozen or so explanations are clear winners, he said.

In the last 15 to 20 years, neuroscientists have begun to peer directly into the brain in search of answers. “Knowing something about how information is represented in the brain and the computational principles of the brain helps you understand why people make decisions how they do,” said Angela Yu, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego.

Glimcher is using both the brain and behavior to try to explain our irrationality. He has combined results from studies like the candy bar experiment with neuroscience data — measurements of electrical activity in the brains of animals as they make decisions — to develop a theory of how we make decisions and why that can lead to mistakes.

Glimcher has been one of the driving forces in the still young field of neuroeconomics. His theory merges far-reaching research in brain activity, neuronal networks, fMRI and human behavior. “He’s famous for arguing that neuroscience and economics should be brought together,” said Nathaniel Daw, a neuroscientist at Princeton University. One of Glimcher’s most important contributions, Daw said, has been figuring out how to quantify abstract notions such as value and study them in the lab.

In a new working paper, Glimcher and his co-authors — Kenway Louie, also of NYU, and Ryan Webb of the University of Toronto — argue that their neuroscience-based model outperforms standard economic theory at explaining how people behave when faced with lots of choices. “The neural model, described in biology and tested in neurons, works well to describe something economists couldn’t explain,” Glimcher said.

At the core of the model lies the brain’s insatiable appetite. The brain is the most metabolically expensive tissue in the body. It consumes 20 percent of our energy despite taking up only 2 to 3 percent of our mass. Because neurons are so energy-hungry, the brain is a battleground where precision and efficiency are opponents. Glimcher argues that the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits. Thus we’re left to be confounded by the choices of the modern American cereal aisle.

Glimcher’s proposal has attracted interest from both economists and neuroscientists, but not everyone is sold. “I think it’s exciting but at this point remains a hypothesis,” said Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Neuroeconomics is still a young field; scientists don’t even agree on what part of the brain makes decisions, let alone how.

So far, Glimcher has shown that his theory works under specific conditions, like those of the candy bar experiment. He aims to expand that range, searching for other Freakonomics-esque mistakes and using them to test his model. “We are aiming for a grand unified theory of choice,” he said.

. . . .

The brain is a power-hungry organ; neurons are constantly sending each other information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes or action potentials. Just as with an electrical burst, prepping and firing these signals take a lot of energy.

In the 1960s, scientists proposed that the brain dealt with this challenge by encoding information as efficiently as possible, a model called the efficient coding hypothesis. It predicts that neurons will encode data using the fewest possible spikes, just as communication networks strive to transmit information in the fewest bits.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, scientists showed that this principle is indeed at work in the visual system. The brain efficiently encodes the visual world by ignoring predictable information and focusing on the surprising stuff. If one part of a wall is yellow, chances are the rest is also yellow, and neurons can gloss over the details of that section. But a giant red splotch on the wall is unexpected, and neurons will pay special attention to it.

Glimcher proposes that the brain’s decision-making machinery works the same way. Imagine a simple decision-making scenario: a monkey choosing between two cups of juice. For simplicity’s sake, assume the monkey’s brain represents each choice with a single neuron. The more attractive the choice is, the faster the neuron fires. The monkey then compares neuron-firing rates to make his selection.

The first thing the experimenter does is present the monkey with an easy choice: a teaspoon of yummy juice versus an entire jug. The teaspoon neuron might fire one spike per second while the jug neuron fires 100 spikes per second. In that case, it’s easy to tell the difference between the two options; one neuron sounds like a ticking clock, the other the beating wings of a dragonfly.

The situation gets muddled when the monkey is then offered the choice between a full jug of juice and one that’s nearly full. A neuron might represent that newest offer with 80 spikes per second. It’s much more challenging for the monkey to distinguish between a neuron firing 80 spikes per second and 100 spikes per second. That’s like telling the difference between the dragonfly’s flutter and the hum of a locust.

Glimcher proposes that the brain avoids this problem by recalibrating the scale to best represent the new choice. The neuron representing the almost-full jug — now the worst of the two choices — scales down to a much lower firing rate. Once again it’s easy for the monkey to differentiate between the two choices.

Link to the rest at Quanta Magazine

PG recognized that this article is a bit dated, but he found the topic fascinating. Humanoid robots making complex decisions seem to be a bit more difficult than he would have thought.

From The Economist

Warfare is complex—and, as those who start wars often discover to their chagrin, unpredictable. Anything which promises to reduce that unpredictability is thus likely to attract both interest and money. Add the ability of modern computers to absorb and crunch unprecedented amounts of data, and throw in a live, data-generating war in the form of the conflict now being slugged out between Ukraine and Russia, not to mention the high level of tension across the Taiwan Strait, and you might assume that the business of trying to forecast the outcomes of conflicts is going into overdrive. Which it is.

One piece of software dedicated to this end is the Major Combat Operations Statistical Model, MCOSM, developed by engineers at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. MCOSM runs algorithms based on data about 96 battles and military campaigns fought between the closing year of the first world war and the present day. When fed information about Russia’s initial push to seize Kyiv and subjugate Ukraine, which began on February 24th, the model predicted, on a scale of one to seven, “operational success” scores for the attacker and defender, respectively, of two and five.

That pretty much nailed it. On March 25th Russia’s forces gave up the idea of taking Kyiv and narrowed their objectives to Ukraine’s east and south, marking the end of what has come to be seen as phase one of the war. Nor was MCOSM‘s forecast a fluke. In the hands of knowledgeable users, says Jon Czarnecki, who created it, it gets seven out of ten forecasts broadly right.

To run an mcosm forecast requires users to estimate 30 values. These cover things like the levels and expected importance, given the fight in question, of each belligerent’s training, firepower, mobility, logistics, reconnaissance, decision-making and ability to sequence and synchronise operations. Keen judgment is needed, for the value of such things is often unknown, or miscalculated, in advance.

The French army that collapsed in May 1940 was, for example, widely thought of beforehand as one of the finest in Europe, just as Russia’s armed forces were thought to have undergone thorough reform since 2008. Nevertheless, Dr Czarnecki, who was a colonel in America’s army before he joined NPS, assigned Russia a dismal value of “one” as its Decisions score. That turned out to reflect well the Kremlin’s overambitious attempt to imitate American shock-and-awe tactics by storming Kyiv rapidly from several directions.

Other models are available. Roger Smith of in[3], a consultancy in Orlando, Florida that advises developers of military forecasting models, was once chief technologist at the American army’s simulation office, also in Orlando. He reckons its team is currently developing or upgrading roughly 100 predictive models, small and large.

Some, like mcosm, are deterministic—meaning the same inputs always produce the same forecast. Others are probabilistic. Consider the matter of, say, a 600-metre rifle shot, taken at dusk against a target who is both walking and wearing a bulletproof vest, with the trigger being pulled by a fatigued, poorly trained sniper. To model an event like this, developers estimate the likelihoods, expressed as percentages, that the shot in question will miss, injure or kill. This typically involves things such as studying past battles, reviewing shooting-range data and taking into account the specifications of the kit involved.

A good example of a probabilistic model is brawler, a simulator of aerial combat produced by ManTech, a defence firm in Herndon, Virginia which is used by America’s navy and air force. brawler crunches hard engineering data on the performance of warplanes, including their numerous subsystems, and also the capabilities of things like ground radar and missile batteries. During a simulation, the virtual representations of this hardware can be controlled either by people or by the software itself. Running the software many times produces probabilities for all manner of outcomes. How much would certain evasive manoeuvres increase an F-16’s chances of dodging a Russian S-400 missile? What about the effects of altitude? Of rain? Of chaff or other countermeasures?

Bar-room brawl

Simulating the physics of all these things is daunting enough. But brawler also includes algorithms that claim to approximate mental and cultural factors. Karen Childers, a retired captain in America’s air force who now works at ManTech, where she is in charge of updating brawler, describes this part of the endeavour as “explicit modelling of the pilot’s brain”.

Take, for example, iff (identification, friend or foe) transponders on warplanes. brawler models both the propagation of iff signals and how their calls on a pilot’s attention distract or slow reaction times. In this, a pilot’s overall cognitive load at a given moment matters. So, Ms Childers says, does the level of skill attributed to each simulated pilot. Beyond that, brawler’s users enter values for each pilot’s sociopolitical background. This requires some leaps of analytical faith. Real pilots from democracies are assumed to be more creative that those from authoritarian regimes that discourage personal initiative.

brawler simulations are typically run with no more than 20 aircraft, but the model can handle thrice that number if needed. Distribution of the full version of the software is tightly restricted, with Britain’s defence ministry the only known foreign recipient. ManTech does, however, sell a version called cobra, from which classified algorithms have been removed. Both South Korea and Taiwan have acquired this.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG doesn’t recall reading any science fiction that included the types of calculation processes mentioned in the OP. Robot soldiers seem to be more popular in sci-fi.

From Esquire:

It’s a cliché to say that we live in science fictional times. But recently it’s felt like we’re living in every science fictional time simultaneously. The world’s richest man decides to purchase a global communications platform on a whim, then decides to back out on a whim. Climate change heat waves lead governments to patrol borders with robot dogs. Meanwhile, a global pandemic rages on, new dystopian technologies are unveiled every day, and the wealthy work on their plans to escape into space. When a scroll through the news reveals a dozen dystopian scenarios—and the daily tasks of work, life, and family trudge on—what’s a novelist who hopes to capture our reality to do?

Maybe novels must do everything too.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a wave of ambitious genre-bending novels whose wide scopes and wild imaginings reflect the surreal state of our times. I’ve come to think of the form as “the speculative epic.” “Speculative” is used here as an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and other fictional modes that imagine worlds different from ours. Examples of these speculative epics from the last two years include Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, Matt Bell’s Appleseed, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao, Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. These novels vary in style and range from breakout debuts to works from established masters, but they all share an epic scope and the use of speculative premises to tackle the biggest concerns of our day.

In 2022, speculative fiction is realism.

Link to the rest at Esquire

From Gizmodo:

Fantasy, especially secondary world fantasy, is a genre about imagination, creating new worlds with different views of everything from culture to economics to the limits of physics, and in many respects, presuming no limitations at all. In that imagining (to paraphrase Max Gladstone), it implies a critique, a perspective on our present reality.

All art is in conversation with its world. Fantasy is no exception and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that secondary world fantasy increasingly has something to say about our current economic model(s) and the power structures they prop up. Two recent(ish) works that have a whole heck of a lot to say in this arena are N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Series and Robert Jackson Bennet’s The Founders Trilogy. I want to focus on the opening novels in both series: The Fifth Season and Foundryside, respectively, because both tackle the nightmare that is late-stage (end-stage?) capitalism in unique ways from different directions.

In The Fifth Season, the world is torn asunder by cataclysmic climate change, the weather patterns so broken that they occasionally produce an impossibly long, harsh winter called the fifth season. Rocked by unpredictable seismic activity and climate, society turns to the mages in their world, called orogenes, to save them. Hated and feared for their magic—orogenes can control energy and through their powers, control (to a degree) the broken world around them—they are seen as a means to an end. We see firsthand how orogenes are used as little more than instruments of the will of the upper castes and the rest of the non-orogene population is similarly controlled through a series of caste structures and communities that ensure they remain disorganized, disenfranchised, and ever on the edge of losing everything they have through lack of resources, natural disasters, and violence.

An earlier emperor sums up the elite’s ruse well with the following: “Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Tell them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve.”

N. K. Jemisin’s words are a literary gut punch about the power structures of modern society. Her words, spoken from the mouth of an imagined emperor from an imagined world, eerily reflect the lived reality of many in the BIPOC community, thrown into harsh relief across every screen in the country with the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter marches during the summer of 2020. In The Fifth Season there is no escape from a society that hates the very beings that allow for its continued existence.

N.K.’s protagonist, Syenite, an orogene herself, finds fleeting freedom from this oppressive culture on a remote island made up of like-minded castaways, but even their isolated enclave cannot be allowed to stand and soon the empire she ran from comes calling with ships and soldiers and the torch of war. Later, Syenite assumes a new identity in one of the small, scattered communities on the mainland and by hiding her magic, by hiding who she really is, manages to find some measure of peace. Until her children begin to display signs of orogeny and are murdered by their community.

Jemisin shapes a world that teaches harsh lessons about our own. Conform or be destroyed, hide your identity at all costs if you want to survive even as you die inside, and understand that true freedom can only be found in fleeting moments, if at all. It’s a bleak world that mirrors the experience of those historically targeted and marginalized in our society. But Jemisin doesn’t leave it there. Through much of The Fifth Season Syenite and the rotating cast of characters thrown in with her are merely trying to survive, to escape, but slowly they come to realize that the world—both physical and societal—cannot be escaped, it must be confronted and forced to recognize them as equals…or be torn asunder.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside takes the many facets of unbridled capitalism, tech culture, and toxic bro culture and crams them into a single city: Tevanne. Here the magic is akin to programming, where complex sigils can be carved into objects to change their properties and shift the very physics of what is possible (think wheels that turn themselves, boulders that believe they’re light as air, and fortresses that believe they’re alive). Rather than use this magic to create a utopia, predictably, the few who discovered this magic instead used it to consolidate their own power.

Link to the rest at Gizmodo and thanks to F. for the tip.

From The National News:

n Sunday, it will be 25 years since a bushy-faced half-giant burst into our lives and changed everything with four monumental words: “Yer a wizard, Harry.”

And, though the wizard in question was bespectacled orphan, Harry Potter, 11, the friendly oaf transformed all our lives on June 26, 1997, when he flung open the doors to the wizarding world with a sweep of his pink umbrella.

The first novel by JK Rowling was published by Bloomsbury in an initial run of 500 copies. Fans would later hear how struggling single mum Rowling spent hours in an Edinburgh coffee shop working on the novels.

Today, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has sold 120 million copies and counting, while more than 500 million copies of the entire seven-book series have flown off the shelves.

. . . .

The subsequent film franchise is the fourth highest grossing of all time with $9.2 billion in worldwide receipts, according to fan site Movieweb. Meanwhile, The Sunday Times puts JK Rowling’s earnings at $1.1 billion, in a rags to riches tale that suitably mirrors Harry’s own rise from the cupboard under the stairs.

The 2000s saw Harry Potter mania take over the world, as Potterheads queued up and camped out for every new book release, each declaring themselves a proud Gryffindor, a cunning Slytherin, a brainy Ravenclaw or a lovable Hufflepuff.

But even the Hermione Grangers of the world don’t know everything about Harry and co.

Here, we take a look at some little-known trivia dating right back to the first drafts, from early rejections to the original character names.

Hold onto your sorting hat.

Chapter one — The boy who lived

JK Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter during a train ride when the idea “fell into her head” and later penned the Hogwart’s school houses on an aeroplane sick bag.

And, though Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was an immediate success, at one stage it seemed as though the book would never be published.

Initially, no one wanted anything to do with “a story about a wizard with a stone” and the manuscript was rejected 12 times by publishers before being picked up by Bloomsbury.

Early drafts of the book also detail a slightly different list of Hogwarts school subjects. Herbology was called “herbalism” and divination was compulsory from the first year, along with alchemy and a subject simply called “beasts”.

Even the early character names were different to those published. Hermione Granger’s surname was initially Puckle, while Neville Longbottom started life as Neville Puff.

Draco Spinks was Malfoy’s earliest name, Luna Lovegood was called Lily Moon and Dean Thomas was known simply as Gary.

Over the years, Rowling has revealed countless trivia about the wizarding world and proudly announced that a sorting hat quiz had put her in Hufflepuff.

In a radio interview in 1999, she explained that she named the Hogwarts headmaster after an old English word meaning bumblebee because she always imagined Dumbledore humming to himself.

And, despite being the golden boy in the books, Rowling admitted it is Albus rather than Harry who is her favourite character in the series.

Link to the rest at The National News

From Yahoo Finance:

A small fleet of Cruise robotaxis in San Francisco suddenly stopped operating on Tuesday night, effectively stopping traffic on a street in the city’s Fillmore district for a couple of hours until employees were able to arrive. TechCrunch first noticed a Reddit post that featured a photo of the stalled driverless cabs at the corner of Gough and Fulton streets. Cruise — which is General Motor’s AV subsidiary — only launched its commercial robotaxi service in the city last week. The rides feature no human safety driver, are geo-restricted to certain streets and can only operate in the late evening hours.

Cruise apologized for the incident in a statement, but gave little explanation for what caused the mishap. “We had an issue earlier this week that caused some of our vehicles to cluster together,” a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “While it was resolved and no passengers were impacted, we apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced.”

The GM-backed AV startup won the first driverless taxi permit in a major US city, and began offering San Francisco residents free rides in February. After launching its paid passenger service on June 24, early reviews from Cruise passengers came pouring in. One passenger noted that his Cruise car took an unusually long route to get to his home. Another passenger seemed to have a more positive experience, even leaving a cash tip for the driverless car.

Link to the rest at Yahoo Finance

Here’s a photo from the company:

While PG was reading this, he flashed back to Hal and Dave.

From The Economist

That a quarter of a century has passed since the world was introduced to Harry Potter, Hogwarts and Quidditch feels like a spell in itself. Since the publication of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” on June 26th, 1997, J.K. Rowling’s seven-book series has been translated into more than 80 languages and sold more than 500m copies; it is by some way the best-selling series of all time. The films have fetched more than $9.6bn at the box office.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Book Riot:

Author Rick Riordan has spoken out against fans upset about casting choices for the upcoming Disney+ adaptation of his series Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

The series follows Percy, a neurodivergent teen who finds out his father is the Greek god Poseidon, making him a demigod. As he contends with his new powers, he’s accused by the god Zeus of stealing his lightning bolt. Percy journeys with his friends Annabeth and Grover to restore order to the heavens.

On Thursday, the cast for two of the main characters of the show were revealed. Even though Riordan has said the response to the casting has been overwhelmingly positive, there are some who have responded negatively to Annabeth Chase being played by 12-year-old Black actress Leah Jeffries.

. . . .

The author posted a response to the criticism on his website, saying “If you have a problem with this casting, however, take it up with me. You have no one else to blame. We should be able to agree that bullying and harassing a child online is inexcusably wrong.”

“You are judging her appropriateness for this role solely and exclusively on how she looks. She is a Black girl playing someone who was described in the books as white.” He continued, “Friends, that is racism.”

The author also touched on how racism goes against the core message of the Percy Jackson series, adding ” The core message of Percy Jackson has always been that difference is strength. There is power in plurality. The things that distinguish us from one another are often our marks of individual greatness. You should never judge someone by how well they fit your preconceived notions. That neurodivergent kid who has failed out of six schools, for instance, may well be the son of Poseidon. Anyone can be a hero.”

Link to the rest at Book Riot

PG had a general idea of what neurodivergent meant, but decided to find out more.

What is neurodiversity?

From Harvard Health Publishing:

Neurodiversity describes the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways; there is no one “right” way of thinking, learning, and behaving, and differences are not viewed as deficits.

The word neurodiversity refers to the diversity of all people, but it is often used in the context of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as well as other neurological or developmental conditions such as ADHD or learning disabilities. The neurodiversity movement emerged during the 1990s, aiming to increase acceptance and inclusion of all people while embracing neurological differences. Through online platforms, more and more autistic people were able to connect and form a self-advocacy movement. At the same time, Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist, coined the term neurodiversity to promote equality and inclusion of “neurological minorities.” While it is primarily a social justice movement, neurodiversity research and education is increasingly important in how clinicians view and address certain disabilities and neurological conditions.

. . . .

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with differences in communication, learning, and behavior, though it can look different from person to person. People with ASD may have a wide range of strengths, abilities, needs, and challenges. For example, some autistic people are able to communicate verbally, have a normal or above average IQ, and live independently. Others might not be able to communicate their needs or feelings, may struggle with impairing and harmful behaviors that impact their safety and well-being, and may be dependent on support in all areas of their life. Additionally, for some people with autism, differences may not cause any suffering to the person themself. Instead, the suffering may result from the barriers imposed by societal norms, causing social exclusion and inequity.

Medical evaluation and treatment is important for individuals with ASD. For example, establishing a formal diagnosis may enable access to social and medical services if needed. A diagnostic explanation may help the individual or their family understand their differences better and enable community connections. Additionally, neurodevelopmental conditions may also be associated with other health issues that require extra monitoring or treatment. It is important that people who need and desire behavioral supports or interventions to promote communication, social, academic, and daily living skills have access to those services in order to maximize their quality of life and developmental potential. However, approaches to interventions cannot be one-size-fits-all, as all individuals will have different goals, desires, and needs.

Link to the rest at Harvard Health Publishing

From Gizmodo:

Star Trek: Picard is going out with a hell of a bang. Paramount has confirmed that the third and now officially final season of the series will culminate with guest appearances from The Next Generation legends: Jean-Luc is getting the Enterprise-D band back together, at last!

To celebrate “First Contact Day,” the date in 2063, as shown in First Contact, that humankind meets the Vulcans, Paramount has confirmed that Picard’s third season, which recently wrapped filming, will see the long-awaited return of a swath of Patrick Stewart’s TNG co-stars. Returning from previous appearances in Picard are Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and Brent Spiner, who have previously appeared as Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and Data (among various members of the Soong family Data’s likeness was based on) in both seasons one and two of the series.

Returning for the first time will be LeVar Burton as Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge; Michael Dorn as TNG and later DS9’s Chief of Security, the Klingon Worf; and Gates McFadden as the Enterprise’s Chief Medical Officer, Beverly Crusher. Check out the announcement below, which includes a few snippets of how the TNG cast will look in their return.

Link to the rest at Gizmodo

From Wired:

IN POUL ANDERSON’S 1970 novel Tau Zero, a starship crew seeks to travel to the star Beta Virginis in hopes of colonizing a new planet. The ship’s mode of propulsion is a “Bussard ramjet,” an actual (though hypothetical) means of propulsion that had been proposed by physicist Robert W. Bussard just a decade earlier. Now, physicists have revisited this unusual mechanism for interstellar travel in a new paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica, and alas, they have found the ramjet wanting. It’s feasible from a pure physics standpoint, but the associated engineering challenges are currently insurmountable, the authors concluded.

A ramjet is basically a jet engine that “breathes” air. The best analog for the fundamental mechanism is that it exploits the engine’s forward motion to compress incoming air without the need for compressors, making ramjet engines lighter and simpler than their turbojet counterparts. A French inventor named Rene Lorin received a patent in 1913 for his concept of a ramjet (aka, a flying stovepipe), although he failed to build a viable prototype. Two years later, Albert Fonó proposed a ramjet propulsion unit to increase the range of gun-launched projectiles, and he was eventually granted a German patent in 1932.

A basic ramjet has three components: an air intake, a combustor, and a nozzle. Hot exhaust from fuel combustion flows through the nozzle. The pressure of the combustion must be higher than the pressure at the exit of the nozzle in order to maintain a steady flow, which a ramjet engine achieves by “ramming” external air into the combustor with the forward speed of whatever vehicle is being powered by the engine. There is no need to carry oxygen on board. The downside is that ramjets can only produce thrust if the vehicle is already moving, so they require an assisted takeoff using rockets. As such, ramjets are most useful as a means of acceleration, such as for ramjet-powered missiles or for increasing the range of artillery shells.

Robert Bussard thought the concept might be modified as a means for interstellar propulsion. The basic premise outlined in his 1960 paper is to scoop up interstellar protons (ionized hydrogen) using enormous magnetic fields as a “ram scoop.” The protons would be compressed until they produced thermonuclear fusion, and magnetic fields would then divert that energy into rocket exhaust to produce thrust. The faster the ship traveled, the higher the proton flow, and the greater the thrust.

But then scientists discovered that there was a much lower density of hydrogen in the regions of space outside our solar system. That’s why, in a 1969 paper, John F. Fishback proposed a possible functional magnetic scoop field, taking into account such factors as radiation losses and the thermal distribution of the interstellar gas.

In particular, Fishback calculated what the cutoff speed would be. “The faster the ship, the higher the magnetic field lines that focus them into the fusion reactor,” the authors of this latest paper explained. “Stronger field[s] induce higher mechanical stresses.” Fishback concluded that an interstellar ramjet could only constantly accelerate up to a certain threshold speed, at which point it would have to throttle back, lest the magnetic source reach a breaking point.

Link to the rest at Wired

PG always preferred teleportation for his own travels.

From Writers in the Storm:

There are few more liberating genres than science fiction. Unfettered by petty limitations like technology or the laws of physics, a sci-fi setting can be crafted to suit the whims of the storyteller and the needs of the story. But anyone who has consumed more than a few pieces of sci-fi literature can tell you that the limitless potential of a sci-fi setting can quickly spiral out of control if care isn’t taken to craft it with depth and consistency.

Let’s go through a quick crash course on how to build a sturdy foundation for your sci-fi story.

Hard Sci-fi vs Soft Sci-fi

A good place to start when crafting your setting is the simple question of how hard or soft you want your sci-fi to be.

Hard Sci-Fi

For the uninitiated, Hard Sci-Fi refers to science fiction with firm roots in reality as we understand it now. There’s still plenty of fiction in a setting like this, but the science is as near to fact as the author can manage. The Martian, for example, is a rock-hard sci-fi story. Everything from the launch date of a Mars mission to the nitty-gritty of orbital mechanics is mapped out with mathematical detail to find the intersection of the realities of science and the requirements of drama.

Hard Sci-Fi comes with a lot of benefits.

First and foremost, the more realistic underpinnings of the setting will make for a world far more familiar to the readers. The technology is likely to look and feel like something that exists in the real world. Even when the technology is futuristic, the reader will generally be able to feel the evolutionary connection to things they work and play with every day. It also takes some of the world-building pressure off the author’s shoulders, as a big hunk of your story bible can be found in science textbooks.

However, if its concrete basis in fact is the greatest strength of hard sci-fi, it is also its greatest weakness. Hard sci-fi is a version of science fiction that you can get wrong. And because hard sci-fi fans tend to be science buffs, chances are very good you’ll hear about it if you forgot to carry a one on that power to mass calculation. This means you’ll be doing loads of homework to get things to align correctly, and bending reality to suit your narrative can become a bit of a puzzle, teasing the laws of physics into just the right configuration to get your characters where they need to go.

Hard sci-fi also is much more likely to feel dated.

Basing it on known and understood scientific principles favors setting it in a near future. This means that as science marches on, it could trample all over your speculative technology by surpassing it in a fraction of the time you’d predicted. Alternately, you could extrapolate your future tech on a theory that could be abandoned or disproved, retroactively making your hard sci-fi much softer than you’d intended.

Soft Sci-Fi

That brings us to soft sci-fi. In short, this is sci-fi where you get to fill in the gaps between what we can do and what you want to do with physics-defying mechanisms of your own concoction. Here’s where you get things like warp drive, bionics, and assorted other forms of applied phlebotinum. Nothing is off the table, so long as you can assemble enough technobabble to convince your audience that it’s plausible within the setting.

The assets of a soft sci-fi setting are clear.

The entire setting can be a playground for your imagination. You never have to worry about a desired plot becoming impossible. Soft sci-fi is where you get space operas of magnificent scope and unbridled adventure. It gives the writer a full palette of colors to paint their masterpiece, rather than simply those offered by Newton and Einstein. It’s what many people think of when they think of science fiction.

There is a dark side to soft sci-fi, however.

Most often, it comes when a writer fails to realize that “new rules” does not mean “no rules.” A soft sci-fi writer should, ideally, be creating a universe with its own laws of physics. Sure, they allow for things like time travel or faster than light travel, but the mechanisms that allow these divergences from our reality must be consistent and believable. If exceeding the speed of light requires a Carpinelli Drive, don’t have someone crossing the galaxy in six minutes using a standard rocket unless you’ve got some really compelling technobabble to justify it.

Taking away all limitations or changing the rules at the drop of a hat will confuse and frustrate readers. In the worst case, this could completely defuse any attempts at creating tension or stakes. Why should we worry if the heroes will reach the imperiled planet in time to save the day if you’ve already established spaceships don’t have to follow their own rules?

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

From The Wall Street Journal:

The science-fiction writers who flourished in the postwar era, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, promised a glittering technological future. A lot of what they imagined has come true, from powerful pocket phones and a global library to synthetic foods and self-driving cars. “The Jetsons,” which premiered in 1962, depicted a futuristic life of extraordinary ease. George Jetson’s flying car folded into his briefcase, while his job at Spacely Space Sprockets consisted mostly of resting his feet on his desk while machines did the work.

The question for J. Storrs Hall is why some of those visions have materialized but others have not. Air travel remains a tedious business of driving to the airport, flying and then driving to the ultimate destination. Space travel languished for decades until a recent private-sector boom. And the way we generate, transmit and use energy remains antiquated.

Mr. Hall is a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and an associate editor of the International Journal of Nanotechnology and Molecular Computation. “Where Is My Flying Car?” is a handsomely designed hardback published by Stripe Press, owned by Stripe, the ragingly successful payments-infrastructure company. The press publishes “ideas for progress,” and Stripe is to be applauded for trusting old-school printing to disseminate ideas. The combination of Mr. Hall and Stripe makes for an unusual kind of book—argumentative, ornery, and technical yet ultimately inspiring.

Mr. Hall focuses on three scientific advances that he believes are within reach but remain unfulfilled: flying cars, nanotechnology and cold fusion. “The reason we don’t have flying cars today isn’t technological feasibility,” he writes. “We have had the means to build, manufacture, and improve flying cars for the better part of a century.”

Similarly, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk in 1959 titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he described an achievable pathway from large-scale to nanoscale manufacturing. Such a shift, he said, would allow us to make ever smaller sets of tools to make ever smaller products. The path was followed intermittently by a few brave souls. Had it been pursued more rigorously, Mr. Hall argues, “the entire physical paraphernalia of The Jetsons’ world would be here now.” The same thing happened to cold fusion, which promised enormous gains in energy use and efficiency but was never seriously pursued.

The author gives several reasons for this dispiriting phenomenon. The first is the “Machiavelli effect.” In “The Prince,” Machiavelli wrote that innovators are opposed by “all those who have done well under the old conditions.” In scientific research, the academy tends to be full of people who have done well under the old conditions and resent novelty. They’re protected by a centralized funding system that rewards incumbents and “makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field.” These established players “are resistant to new, outside, not-Ptolemaic ideas. The ivory tower has a moat full of crocodiles.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Hydrogen Sonata:

The Caconym was silent for a few moments. It watched a small solar flare erupt from near one side of the sunspot over which it had stationed itself. Another tendril of the star’s gaseous shrapnel, ejected by an earlier outburst of the furious energies erupting for ever beneath it, and thousands of kilometres across and tens of thousands long, washed over and around it, bathing its outer field structure in radiation and delivering a distinct physical blow.

It allowed itself to be gently buffeted by the impact, using its engine fields to adjust its apparent mass and so increasing its inertia so that the effect would fall within acceptable parameters, while observing the outermost elements of its field structure deform inwards by a few micrometres under the weight of the blast. The effect of the colliding gust of plasma was to send it drifting very slightly across the face of the sunspot, spinning slowly.

Link to the rest at The Hydrogen Sonata