Oh, Science Fiction, I know I’ve neglected you this last year or so, but baby I’m ready to make it up to you.

New Scientist has a state of Sci Fi special issue that includes opinions on the pulse of the genre by a few of its greats including, of course, William Gibson:

The Future of Science Fiction? We're living in it. Those "Future History" charts in the back of every Robert A Heinlein paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the "Crazy Years". He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one. Otherwise, I'm assuming these are those years.

The thing called science fiction that we do with literature will always be with us. The genre we've called science fiction since about 1927, maybe not so much. That's something to do with the nature of genres, though, and nothing to do with the nature of science fiction.

Rudy Rucker gives us a look at the early days of Cyberpunk, by sharing a snippet from his memoir Nested Scrolls:

Sterling’s zine, Cheap Truth¸ didn’t have any particular name for the emerging new SF movement—it wouldn’t be until the next year that the cyberpunk label would take hold. I got together with Sterling, William Gibson, and Lew Shiner in September of 1983. We partied together at a world science fiction convention in Baltimore—they’d all read my new novel The Sex Sphere, which had just been published by Ace.

Gibson was an impressive guy from the start. He was tall, with an unusually thin and somewhat flexible-looking head. When I met him at one of the con parties, he said he was high on some SF-sounding drug I’d never heard of. Perfect. He was bright, funny, intense, and with a comfortable Virginia accent.

If you scroll down you’ll see a rather witty comment from Charles Stross, one of the only people that I honestly believe moves Sci Fi forward. Somewhat related, Stross recently admitted to just now finishing Sterling’s 2005 book Shaping Things and has playfully waved off any aspiring writers dealing in the near future from mining it for ideas (so he can have them for his own).

I’m looking to catch up on my Science Fiction over the winter. If you have any must reads from the last year of so please drop suggestions in the comments.

According to X-Play, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin will be playable characters in new downloadable content for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames on the Xbox360 and PS3. I haven't actually played it yet, but the game already looked like complete madness(You can fire tactical nuclear warheads and call in airstrikes as you rampage across the land.) and now you can actually play as Sarah Palin or Barrack Obama blowing shit up and killing people for cash. Quite the follow-up videogame appearance after the billboards in Burnout Paradise. I don't see a specific release date, but they say "November".

Holy Shit, Jesse Jackson was weeping like a wee lass!!

That was the moment when I lost it last night. Home alone with a 102 fever it was inevitable that I was going to get a bit teary eyed at some point, but thanks the Rev. Jackson I didn’t even make it the speech with my eyeliner intact.

My first political memory, the point zero for the quick metastasizing political virus in my life, was Jackson’s ’88 primary campaign. On paper I was a little too young and way too country to be so excited by Jesse’s fiery rhetoric but that didn’t stop me from running home from school to watch the news each night with the naïve hope that he could actually pull it off.

So seeing the man that first piqued my interest in politics twenty years ago and gave me my first insight into the civil rights struggle, completely took my knees out from under me. For a moment I was that naive little kid again though this time the soul crushing letdown at the campaign’s end dissolved into joy.

With the huge amount of reporting and punditry right now I'm not going to run this out too long but there is one point that I think is being lost in the excitement. Sure on its face it would be great to have any African-American elected president under any circumstance, but this event transcends that. That this candidate, an intelligent, thoughtful post-boomer pragmatist, was elected in this manner, with historic voter turnout, carrying states across the middle of the country both big and small and over performing his Democratic predecessors with white voters by a large margin, at this time, well things are bit desperate ‘round these parts aren’t they?, that makes this a truly monumental opportunity for renewal and redemption of the American story.

A couple of odd post-election pieces you may not have caught:

B-more Dubstep heavyweight and all around good guy, Joe Nice shares his personal election experience with Martin Clarke.

UK native, and tweakers’ preferred futurist, Charles Stross explains after the fact how he would have voted if he was and American

Fellow Brooklyn boy Matt Shadetek channels a little Sam Cooke

One more personal story, as I was trying to get to sleep last night amid the rawkus celebrating and fireworks that I really wanted to be a part of, a girl walked by my window gently singing My Country Tis of Thee, now let my explain that drunken singing is the norm in our corner of Williamsburg, we don’t know quite why but last call BillyBurg hipster are a musical lot, but to hear this rather earnestly patriotic song sung spontaneously and without irony, well it was fucking weird man, sweet yes, but still weird.

Anyway, I’m going to let myself enjoy this moment with a bit of optimism the next few days and then begin psyching myself up for the Obama’s foot meets fire mission that will begin by years end. This is a moment of great opportunity but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up skeptical criticism and positive cynicism for love beads and an Obey/Hope hoodie.

The snow kept falling. Sometimes it stopped. Charley came by. Eric had bad dreams. Batu did not go to bed. When the zombies came in, he followed them around the store, taking notes. The zombies didn't care at all. They were done with all that.

Batu was wearing Eric's favorite pajamas. These were blue, and had towering Hokusai-style white-blue waves, and up on the waves, there were boats with owls looking owlish. If you looked closely, you could see that the owls were gripping newspapers in their wings, and if you looked even closer, you could read the date and the headline:

"Tsunami Tsweeps Pussy
Overboard, All is Lots."

Batu had spent a lot of time reorganizing the candy aisle according to chewiness and meltiness. The week before, he had arranged it so that if you took the first letter of every candy, reading across from left to right, and then down, it had spelled out the first sentence of To Kill a Mockingbird, and then also a line of Turkish poetry. Something about the moon.

The zombies came and went, and Batu put his notebook away. He said, "I'm going to go ahead and put jerky with Sugar Daddies. It's almost a candy. It's very chewy. About as chewy as you can get. Chewy Meat gum."

"Frothy Meat Drink," Eric said automatically. They were always thinking of products that no one would ever want to buy, and that no one would ever try to sell.

"Squeezable Pork. It's on your mind, it's in your mouth, it's pork. Remember that ad campaign? She can come live with us," Batu said. It was the same old speech, only a little more urgent each time he gave it. "The All-Night needs women, especially women like Charley. She falls in love with you, I don't mind one bit."

"What about you?" Eric said.

"What about me?" Batu said. "Charley and I have the Turkish language. That's enough. Tell me something I need. I don't even need sleep!"

A somewhat Halloweenee post. Kelly Link’s wonderful short story collection, Magic for Beginners, is now available as a free download. So if somehow you have yet to acquire a copy you now have absolutely no excuse. To me Link’s writing shares an aesthetic with the best pop-surrealist visual art and my envy of her skills is so severe as to elicit physical pain.

The Hortlak, quoted above and Some Zombie Contingency Plans are pretty much required tweaker reading, while Stone Animals is an enchanting and disturbing work of literature that will echo through your subconscious long after reading.

Link’s new collection, Pretty Monsters, is just out in hardcover. Carlygirl is taking first crack at our copy but I seriously doubt it will disappoint.

But Ariel says nothing. She’s content to simply be wearing her beloved white dress. She adores when her mommy scrunches it up and pops her head through the top-hole then pulls it down over her shoulders until it falls just below her knobby knees, knobby knees. It makes her look like the puffy clumps of goo that hover above when she visits the playground with Mommy. Each time she wears her dress, she is a solitary cloud drifting in the gusts, peering down on the green and blue ball below. That place down there: Theirs.

New fiction from Jay Gersch @ FreightTrain Magazine.

Jay also continues to pull no punches in his regular Memoirs of a Misanthrope column for HackNYC.

Sign of the times?

Let’s hope.

Prophane and I attended a sneak preview of the new Disinfo film 2012: Science Superstition last week. The film is a pretty good primer on the various theories surrounding the Dec. 21, 2012 date. We were a little upset that there was no mention of Terence McKenna but the filmmaker explained in the Q&A that followed that the McKenna section had to be cut for structural reasons and would appear as a special stand alone feature on the DVD release.

Also, on hand for the Q&A was 2012 scribe Daniel Pinchbeck who showed a teaser for his own upcoming 2012 documentary, and put his more positive, social paradigm shift focused, spin on the 2012 mythos. Pinchbeck can be simultaneously inspiring and frustration to listen to. He is chock full of paradigm bursting ideas and enlightening philosophical connections but he is never able to focus on one train of thought long enough to get beyond the initial moment of revelation and into a deeper discussion of the issues. He also has a tendency to be unnecessarily argumentative and at times glib and condescending in a way that I puts me off personally.

This being said there was some interesting discussion to be had at the event. What struck Prophane and I the most was the seemingly unsubstantiated belief, most reflected in long monologues disguised as audience questions, that the 2012 event was going to be a positive, even spiritually awakening event. At its best this strain of mythic thinking is a willful intent to make the best of prophesied opportunity for change, but at its worst it’s a dogmatic, reactionary delusion borne of a sense of powerlessness against the madness of modern society and/or a state of denial brought on by the severity of scientific doomsday theories. The science may not always be sound among the purveyors of theories of global cataclysm related to 2012 but at least they have astrological or archeological evidence. What many in the audience at this discussion were asserting vigorously were unsubstantiated claims that amounted to over intellectualized versions of the dogma spat out by born again x-tians regaling the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth. I’m all for the power of positive thinking but without being connected to facts or at least being the catalyst for constructive action, these platitudes are nothing more than emotional defense mechanisms designed to unburden us of cruel realities and relieve us of individual responsibility for our actions.

These millenarian hippies can have their global moment of awareness or transitional moment of universal consciousness. Me I’m going in with Prophane on a mighty dirigible so we can we can be airborne when the magnetic poles shift, watching the fire and chaos erupt below us as drift off to safety.

No info from the Arthur folks as to where this image comes from but its making me smile on a dreary day.

If you have some time to on your hands, sadly I do not, you can read Emma’s Living My Life, where the quote is taken from. Its pretty inspiring stuff.

A new Amy Sol print (pictured above), will be made available starting this Saturday 10/25 at 6pm pacific time. Titled Flying Fish it is a piece from her recent Thinkspace show.

Though it is very lovely its not taking my breath away in the same manner as the glimpses of her new work for the upcoming Smoke & Water show at Mondo Bizzaro in Rome. If I were a wealthy man I would use this as an excuse to return to Rome for Xmas.

Sol has developed a new technique specifically for this show that incorporates illustration in dry materials on cotton instead of her signature paint on wood. If the image below is any indication we may fall in love with her work all over again.



more info and pics at the excellent Arrested Motion blog.