@mpax@lougrims Welcome! There’s a lot of folks here (including many authors, such as @scalzi , @marthawells, @cstross), and other great folks such as the creator/maintainer of the venerable Atomic Rockets site, @nyrath.
Good cyberpunk touch for cybermonday. A free book pirated by its authors. For many years in print, we decided to allow it to be free online...
The MIRRORSHADES cyberpunk story collection, the original, with stories by William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear, Lew Shiner, Marc Laidlaw, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Tom Maddox, Paul Di Filippo , James Patrick Kelly, and, yes, me--
True. What they don't usually tell you is that her husband Percy Shelley, was an established poet and novelist but without much success early on. He was not too happy when his young wife, got acclaim and fame - more than his - on her first novel.
“Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative.” - part of a brilliant graduation address by Cory Doctorow ( @pluralistic ) to York University.
A great piece about science fiction, optimism, pessimism, fatalism, humane agency, Luddites, tech bros, inevitability, and the need to always seek alternatives… and to find hope.
"Optimism is the belief that things will get better, no matter what we do.
Pessimism is the belief that things will get worse, no matter what we do.
Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things.
The belief that nothing will change — that nothing can change — is the wrecker’s most powerful weapon. After all, if you can convince people that nothing can be done, they won’t try to do anything." - Cory Doctorow's NY Univ. graduation address
'Then his face fell. He hung up and said, “He says they only teach literature.”'
The farther you go in academia, the more you realize that it has weird priorities ... it's a very inward looking prestige hierarchy.
I think many students realize this during grad school. Looks like Cory was unlucky (or perhaps lucky?) enough to see the inside of the sausage early on.
Okay so NOW this FREE cyberpunk collection (which is so old you can see on the cover that it was only $3.50 for a paperback copy), is available as an #ebook download (FREE, I said!) as well as just opening it to read on your device. If you want it in that format, you can go there and try out the two ebook download systems it's offered on, let me know if it's not working.
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival was released 7 years ago today.
I love this "close encounter".
"A linguist is recruited by the army to communicate with an extraterrestrial life-form after twelve mysterious spaceships land around the world." #scifi#arrival#movie#spaceship#alien#villeneuve
I'm in this huge CYBERPUNK book, along with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic and lots more.
The Big Book of Cyberpunk arrives September 26. Editor Jared Shurin tells File 770, “As with any attempt at a definitive collection, I suspect (and hope) it will provoke conversation!”
At over a thousand pages it is the largest anthology of the genre, with authors from over two dozen countries. #bookstodon#sff#scifi#books
@johnshirley2024@pluralistic Right now, Amazon seem to think it's paperback only. Actually that's UK. It is available as Kindle in the USA. So either the electronic version is stuck mid-atlantic or there's some publishing rights nonsense.
@jbond@pluralistic There's a hardcover in the USA too. I'm seeing the kindle on amazon here, yeah, and it doesn't say it's only in the usa but maybe it's not in like france et al because it's not translated yet?
A #scifi question: are there any novels set in protoplanetary disk systems? Everyone seems to go for fully formed planets, but you could play an excellent game of hide and seek in the Hill sphere of a forming gas giant, no?