For reasons that defy explanation, I am somehow considered a viable authority on the general fields of science fiction and fantasy media, because the poor fools over at the SF Signal Podcast allowed me to inflict myself upon their 2013 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Year in Review episode.
Fortunately, an actual best-selling genre author (Gail Carriger) and an actual seasoned podcast authority (Jeff Patterson) were on hand to make sure Patrick Hester wasn't trapped with just me on the line to make himself look bad. Gail is worth the price of admission alone, and Jeff is...well...he's spent several decades working the dark underbelly of television. It's done things to his mind...unnatural things...but it makes for good podcasting.
We all know that one guy who claims to love science fiction but throws a galactic hissy fit if any story involves faster-than-light travel. But is that FTL-snob typical of science fiction in a way that, say, historical swordcraft experts are not typical of epic fantasy?
Hard science fiction is often code for "sci fi that requires the reader to do math" -- it's a label that turns off not just non-sci-fi fans, but even devout but nontechnical science fiction fanatics. Are there hard sci-fi books that not only overcome this label, but might imbue a nascent love of the subgenre?
[BONUS: We stop mid-podcast to disabuse Patrick of the notion that The 13th Warrior is a good movie. I may have instigated this intervention. I also haven't been invited back to the podcast since. Coincidence? I think not.]
If you're looking for the nerdiest of all possible holiday gifts, this podcast is an ultra-geeky idea factory. Take a listen.
Image by Mykl Roventine via FlickrAnother Saturday, another horrifying example of my radio non-talent, courtesy of TechTalk WRLR in Chicago. This week, I enthrall listeners with the knowledge of which medieval poet and author is responsible for the modern day celebration of April Fool’s. Thankfully, the show is rescued from my pedantry with a discussion of how to recycle your old cell phones in service to a good cause. Give a listen.
Image via WikipediaRobert A Heinlein is considered one of the most influential writers in the history of science fiction -- but are Heinlein's works still relevant today? Thus is the question posed (and, ostensibly, answered) in my latest SF Signal podcast appearance.
I have been frustratingly unavailable to participate in these of late, but suffice it to say, the SF Signal Podcast is audibly awesome. Should you have some perverse need to hear my spoken opinions on various sci-fi topics, you can do so via the following SF Signal episodes:
HOPA girl (n.) - An internet meme that seems too good to be true, but becomes popular anyway. Also known as a dry erase girl, whiteboard girl, Jenny DryErase or HPOA girl. Named after a hoax perpetrated by theChive, a meme-centered website, in which a brokerage employee resigns by mass-emailing pictures of herself holding a whiteboard to her colleagues. The whiteboard details the employee's reason for the theatrical resignation: Her boss referred to her as a HOPA, a mangled form of the acronym for hot piece of ass.
I bring it up because:HOPA girl went down this week, and in so doing sparked a navel-gazing debate amongst the blogosphere about the nature of memes and the gullibility of traffic-starved bloggers. Basically, once one major site runs with a HOPA girl meme -- which by definition seems too good to be true and thus likely to be a hoax -- every other major meme site has to run with it too. All it takes is one high-profile sucker and the whole Internet is obligated to play along for fear of losing immediate traffic. Thus, expect to see more HOPA girls, not less --especially since the guys behind HOPA girl have done this before. So much for the web being the future of (serious) journalism.
Unobtainium (n.) - Snarky term for either a scientifically impossible substance that makes some fantastic device or process possible, or an exotic real-world substance that is conferred with implausible or impossible properties for the sake of a story. The classic examples are Cavorite, a metal that creates antigravity fields as first imagined by H. G. Wells in The First Men in the Moon, and scrith, the impossibly strong material from which Larry Niven's Ringworld was built. A more contemporary example would be dilithium, the crystal from Star Trek that regulates matter-antimatter annihilations and makes warp drive possible.
Science fiction fans (and, more importantly, critics and editors) refer to these blatant wish-granting elements and minerals as unobtainium, as they are unobtainable in the real world. Equivalent phrases include: Unattainium, wishalloy, buzzwordium, handwavium (for technical handwaving), and element 404 (as in Not Found).
I bring it up because: 14 years ago this week, the first pure Bose-Einstein condensate was synthesized. A BEC is an extremely weird state of matter with behaviors that cannot be fully explained by current science--including a propensity to spontaneously crawl out of containment vessels. Bose-Einstein condensates are often used as contemporary stand-ins for classic fictional unobtainium in modern science fiction stories, as it "sounds" more real and the author at least has the flimsy cover of "science doesn't understand it" to explain how BECs can turn raw matter into a Jovian mooncastle using only a souped-up inkjet printer (I'm looking at you, Charles Stross's Accelerando.) Plus, Bose-Einstein condensate is just fun to type, even if it sounds vaguely like the residue from a lightspeed subwoofer.
In what can only be categorized as an act of insane hubris, I've decided that the Written Weird is going to in fact host a follow-up to my late, lamented Geek Trivia column called the Nerd Word of the Day. It will be a small hybird of my previous trivia work and my glossary of science fiction words.
My initial goal is to make these entries brief, timely, snarky--and to do them every weekday. Whether I can pull that off remains to be seen, but if ever I was to do a sequel to Geek Trivia, this would be it. It should start tomorrow, so stay tuned.
Even though he promised not to berate the dying Big Three science fiction magazines, Warren Ellis just can't help himself--pointing out with bitter glee that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had to cut its frequency in half to survive. Meanwhile, Analog and Asimov's dropped their per-issue word counts by 4000 apiece. Taken together, these are the latest death tremor of printed short-form sci-fi. Put another way, people won't be putting short-form sci-fi onto bundles of dead trees much longer.
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