Pwnded By the Future

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Don't get me wrong.  I think the world of Corning Glass.  Those guys are really rocking the material.  Some forty years ago, I took the tour of their headquarters in Corning, New York, and was blown away by all the amazing things they can do with glass.  And, obviously, their research people have been working full-tilt boogie ever since.

But . . .

Imagine a world where you're never out of reach.  Where your boss can communicate with you while you're in the bathroom, brushing your teeth.  Where your mother-in-law can track your parenting skills in real time.  Where advertising videos show you primping like a whore.  Where television screens turn on the instant you awake and are never out of your sight for a single moment in your waking hours.  Where all the universe is trivialized and made your sedative.

Sounds like today, you say?  Not yet.

But soon.





Above: A Day Made of Glass. Coming soon to a reality near you.

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Scribbedehobbledehoydenii: The Magpie's Eye: Page 184

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Mostly just a list of things that needed to be done.  I censored a telephone number -- for who or what, I have no idea.

The UR at the bottom was for a game demo which for some reason I wanted to try out.  It was supposed to be posted soon.  I checked recently and it never materialized.

The URL at the top, though, for a list of predictions made in 1900 for the year 2000 is still functional, and the list is pretty interesting.  Some of the predictions were duds:  We still use the letter X, peas are not as large as beets, and motor traffic has not been banned from the streets of our major cities.  Others, though, were spot-on.  And at least one -- that the average American's life span would increase almost fifty percent to fifty years -- was far too modest.

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A Bad Idea (With Step-By-Step Instructions)

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HOW TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR PENZEY'S SPICES BUMPER STICKER

1.  Visit your local Penzey's Spices store.

2.  Pick up one of their FREE bumper stickers.

3.  Assemble your tools:  Cutting board, scissors, and Sharpie pen (black).

4.  Cut up the bumper sticker as shown.  Throw away the superfluous parts.

5.  With your Sharpie, change the period to a question mark.

6.  Affix the top half of your modded sticker to your car's bumper.

7.  And now the bottom half.


8.  Seek help immediately.  No rational person would do something like this.  There's probably something wrong with you.


And I'll be making appearances in TWO cities this week . . .



Here's the nitty-gritty:

Wednesday, September 21

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series.  – Michael Swanwick & Andy Duncan

Andy Duncan is one of the great readers in science fiction, so this should be great.

7pm

KGB Bar

85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave)

New York, NY 10003

Baltimore Book Festival:  All Events at the SFWA Booth (I believe)

Friday, September 23

3:00-3:30 pm Reading: Michael Swanwick

Acclaimed science fiction author Michael Swanwick will read from his works and talk about his science fiction and fantasy.

4:00 pm. Group signing, chat, raffles

Join authors Rosemary Edgehill, Toby Devens, John Maclay, Michael Swanwick, Michael Sullivan, and Cindy Young-Turner to chat, have your books autographed, and win prizes.

6:00 pm Publishing as a professional writer in speculative fiction

Panelists Michael Swanwick, Catherine Asaro, and Toby Devens offer tips and answer questions about how to get started in genre fiction and conduct a successful career.

Saturday, September 24

2:00 pm 1984--Are we there yet?

Panelists Brenda Clough, Don Sakers, Alan Zendell, and Michael Swanwick discuss the social and political themes in science fiction, as in the tradition of the novel "1984" Science fiction offers a unique vehicle for examining the consequences of various political and sociolical phenomena by extrapolating them into the future.  Just how provocative can you make such ideas?  Is it ever too much? Come share your thoughts and ideas with our panelists.

Above:  Kids, don't do this at home!  Or anywhere else for that matter.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 183

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Another collage.  I rather like this one.

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SA Saturday Non-Blog

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I got up this morning to discover a robotic killer-hunter predator at my back door.  Then I went out to see some Fringe theater and bought a fedora at a flea market.

Life is good.

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Dinofeathers

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It's astonishing the stuff you can find, once you start looking for it.  It was only a few years ago that the first feathered dinosaur fossils -- other than Archaeopteryx, of course -- were found.  I remember that clearly, because I was researching my dinosaur novel Bones of the Earth when the fossils first came out of China.  Now Ryan C. McKellar, Brian D. E. Chatterton, Alexander P. Wolfe, and (one almost adds “of course”) Philip J. Currie have published a paper in Science stating that they have found an assemblage of dino and bird feathers in Canadian late Cretaceous amber.

That leaves us a long, long way from the late Michael Crichton's dream of resurrecting dinosaurs from their DNA and then letting them escape into the suburbs where they can eat our children, of course.  But it's a start.

You can read the paper's abstract here.  Or you can read a good summary article (with lots of pix!) here.


And I'm back in print again . . .

Or, rather, still in print but in a different format.  Anyway, I just received a copy of the trade paperback of The Dragons of Babel in the mail.  Even in the cheap scan to the right, it looks good.  That's because of the Stephen Martiniere cover.

Note also that they put the blurb from Michael Moorcock on the front.  That's the guy who wrote Gloriana, the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy and the Elric books.  To say nothing of his work as editor of New Worlds or . . . well, if you get me started, we'll be here all day.  In brief, he's a man whose good opinion is worth having.  So you can imagine how happy I am to have it.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 182

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Jeff Ford it says and then (crossed out) write the hardest story you know how.  

I can only speculate that this is some piece of writing advice I heard from Jeff, that I was going to try it myself, and then that I decided that this was what I do pretty much every time anyway.

Mysterious Benedicts Society (YA -- recommended by Peggy Rae)

Then a shopping list.

Then a picture clipped from an alternate art magazine, with a post office sticker on it, simply so I'd have made a change on it.  No improvement, really.

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