I just got my contributors' copies of the Frederik Pohl tribute anthology Gateways, and I find myself in danger of losing the afternoon's work to re-reading it. Gateways is a collection of short stories written in appreciation of Pohl, one of science fiction's masters and living legends. It includes fiction by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison (A new Stainless Steel Rat story in Pohl style, no less!), Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe -- and me.
My story, Chicken Little, is the closing novella, and it's my take on The Space Merchants: a darkly comic story about a man whose job is to come up with products to sell to immortal quadrillionaires who've speciated from the human race proper and now live as sovereign states in vats that supply their life-support.
Additionally, Gateways features essays about Pohl and his work by Isaac Asimov, Gardner Dozois, Connie Willis, Robert J Sawyer, Robert Silverberg, Joan Slonczewski, Emily Pohl-Weary (Fred's granddaughter and the Hugo-winning co-author of Judith Merril's wonderful memoir, Better to Have Loved) and editor James Frenkel.
This is truly a smashing volume, a testament to the impact that Pohl has had on several generations of sf writers and readers (he continues to write, of course, and his blog, The Way the Future Blogs is up for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writing!). It was edited by Fred's wife, Elizabeth Anne Hull, who did yeoman duty on it while nursing Fred through several serious health crises in the past two years.
I'm so proud to be in this book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Indiana University science historian William Newman built a 17th century laboratory to recreate the work of alchemists. According to Newman, these early makers had a method to their madness, resulting in a "A solid body of repeated and repeatable observations of laboratory results." Discover sent a photographer to Newman's lab for a feature in the new issue. From a teaser on Discover's blog:
Here we have Professor Newman holding a beaker of concentrated nitric acid (aqua fortis) dissolving copper into a green solution. At his left foot is a large glass bottle of nitrogen dioxide in the process of combining with water vapor to form more nitric acid, according to the recipe supplied by Isaac Newton.
Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, Newman and Principe reveal the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the authors show how this American "chymist" translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes.
Boing Boing fave cartoonist/fine artist Jim Woodring wants to make a massive giant steel dip pen and penholder. If you're not familiar with Jim's work, I highly recommend The Book of Jim, Seeing Things, and his latest, Weathercraft. I have an original drawing by Jim hanging in my office and just one glance triggers an instantaneous dream state. The idea of him wielding a massive dip pen is delightful and strange, just like his art. Please help Jim raise the funds to make the instrument. From ProjectSite:
The dip pen is a bit of fetish item for me (as it is for many pen users). The pen is extremely difficult to master but ultimately allows for an extraordinary degree of expression. The well-constructed pen and ink drawing is a monument to perseverance, requiring tremendous patience and control. I am thrilled by the challenge of creating such drawings in public and introducing new audiences to the allure of the medium. The pen (nib) itself will be approximately 16 inches long, made of steel and fully functional. The holder will be six feet long and made of wood with a metal sleeve insert to hold the pen. Nib and holder will resemble as closely as possible the actual implements on which they are based.
Once the pen and penholder are built I will train myself to ink with it; and once I've done that, I will arrange at least two public performances in which I will use the pen to ink large graphite drawings on 3' x 5' sheets of bristol.
From July 24th through November 7th, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo will feature the work of Indonesian art trio Tromarama. Tromarama uses animation, stop-motion, woodblock prints, and other crafty things to create these fun music videos. I highly recommend you check it out if you're passing through Tokyo — the museum also has one of the best views of the city.
MIT researchers are developing a new textile fiber that can "hear" and produce sound. They've published their latest breakthroughs in the scientific journal Nature Materials. From MIT News:
Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain...
"You can actually hear them, these fibers," says Noémie Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. "If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current" — an alternating current whose period is very regular — "then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it."
In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibers could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions: A fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.
"Floating Point" is a lovely time-lapse video by photographer Samuel Cockedey. By now the conventions of this type of video are pretty well established: The high perspective (usually urban), the moody music (usually electronic), the onrushing clouds, the streaming traffic. (Remember "The Sandpit"?) But Cockedey adds an element that a lot of others don't: A prominent credit line overlaying the bottom right corner of the video. It's his absolute right to safeguard his work in any manner he sees fit, of course. But the thing is so distracting that it ends up, for me at least, marring the experience. And it raises a question I can't immediately answer: When there's a clash between making a creative work and protecting its provenance, which one is more important?
Ever wanted your own 1:1 papercraft doppelganger? Rejoice, for Instructables user ddi7i4d has the technique. It takes a week, and it kicks Flat Stanley's 2D ass from here to every exotic locale on Earth.
Over on Tor.com, senior editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden has some notes on the upcoming monster authorized Heinlein biography, whose first volume, Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): Learning Curve goes on sale on August 17th. I've been ploughing through my advance copy as quickly as I can. It's exhaustive and often exhilarating, and rewards close attention and perseverance, as when twenty pages of close detail on life in the US Navy in the 1920s turns out to be scene-setting for an erotic account of Heinlein's time among the free-love set in Greenwich Village while on shore leave.
On August 17, Tor Books will publish the first half of William H. Patterson's much-anticipated two-volume authorized biography of Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century: Volume I, Learning Curve, 1907-1948. In commemoration of this, Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill has asked several of the great and the good of modern SF to identify their own favorite Heinlein novel and explain why. I've read all the pieces she got back, and they may intrigue and surprise you. They're going up on the Tor/Forge blog, one a week, beginning with David Brin's.
Yes,once again CBO brings you exclusive previews from Classical Comics!
The award winning company’s next book will be Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. Clive Bryant,owner of Classical Comics,quite rightly points out that The Canterville Ghost has never been produced as a graphic novel before. Classics Illustrated did an adaption but this was only available in the UK and was very short because of page limitation. In Poland in the 1980s it was published in a very shortened version as Durch Z Canterville.
Here,Classical Comics will be doing what they excell at:top quality art,quality printing that leaves many other publishers miles behind and,most importantly,the work will be a true adaption:Original Text,Quick Text,etc.. And this is so very important because you just cannot cut up Wilde’s writing! Many people today seem to forget or have no idea just how good a writer Wilde was.
The art is by Steve Bryant [no,no relation to Clive!] and the colouring is by Jason Millet. The interiors and exteriors are superbly rendered and the usual expected historical accuracy in costumes is there. Some might recall that Bryant and Millet worked together on Athena Voltaire:
I’ve selected a few pages below as a preview as I think they show the quirky nature of some of Wilde’s humour. After all,who on hearing clanking chains picks up a bottle of oil and quite matter-of-factly confronts a ghost and insists it oil its chains? The facial expression of the dumb-founded ghost is very well drawn.
There are other scenes such as a fainting domestic. Solution? Dock the money from her pay every time she faints and she’ll soon stop it!
It is a very brave move to adapt a Wilde book and from what I’ve seen I think Classical Comics and its team have succeeded admirably -now they just need to get that famous Wilde admirer,actor Stephen Fry to comment on the work!
No doubt another award winning work!
The book goes to print in August so keep visiting the Classical Comics web site via our nifty blog roll -and remember they have a Face Book page now!
Like Cinebook,this is a British company to be proud of.
Welcome on fanzines dot info! Once upon a time, fanzines were technically modest do-it-yourself magazines, put together with a lot of enthusiasm, but generally not much money. Now that the process has been virtualized through Internet, everything is completely different, but everything is still exactly the same... all the same. Fanzines.info is a meta-fanzine, offering you an uncoherent magma of what's going on today in the realm of fanzines in cyberspace. This happens in many languages. Read the ones which you understand. Or viceversa. Enjoy.
I just got my contributors' copies of the Frederik Pohl tribute anthology Gateways, and I find myself in danger of losing the afternoon's work to re-reading it. Gateways is a collection of short stories written in appreciation of Pohl, one of science fiction's masters and living legends. It includes fiction by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison (A new Stainless Steel Rat story in Pohl style, no less!), Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe -- and me.
The dip pen is a bit of fetish item for me (as it is for many pen users). The pen is extremely difficult to master but ultimately allows for an extraordinary degree of expression. The well-constructed pen and ink drawing is a monument to perseverance, requiring tremendous patience and control. I am thrilled by the challenge of creating such drawings in public and introducing new audiences to the allure of the medium. The pen (nib) itself will be approximately 16 inches long, made of steel and fully functional. The holder will be six feet long and made of wood with a metal sleeve insert to hold the pen. Nib and holder will resemble as closely as possible the actual implements on which they are based.
Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain...
On August 17, Tor Books will publish the first half of William H. Patterson's much-anticipated two-volume authorized biography of Robert A. Heinlein, Robert A. Heinlein In Dialogue with His Century: Volume I, Learning Curve, 1907-1948. In commemoration of this, Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill has asked several of the great and the good of modern SF to identify their own favorite Heinlein novel and explain why. I've read all the pieces she got back, and they may intrigue and surprise you. They're going up on the Tor/Forge blog, one a week, beginning with David Brin's.
Apple's holding a press conference