On the eve of dConstruct 2012, Jeremy Keith hosts an evening of readings and chat with three of the brightest stars of the science-fiction world at the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton.
Event details: http://brightonsf.adactio.com/
Transcript: http://adactio.com/articles/5740/
“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. Those who can’t imagine the future are doomed to fuck it up.”
Lauren Beukes explores how fiction is a model our brains run to explore other lives and possibilities, overcome issue fatigue and fire our cultural imagination.
http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/beukes/
Lauren Beukes is the author of Zoo City, which won the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award. That’s because it’s bloody brilliant. Seriously, if you haven’t read it, grab a copy now.
Her first novel, the excellent near-future dystopia Moxyland, was set in Cape Town, where Lauren lives with her husband and daughter. Her next book, The Shining Girls, will be set in Chicago and feature a time-travelling serial killer.
As well as being a novelist, Lauren is a journalist and has collaborated on television and comic book projects.
What kind of future do you want to live in? What excites or concerns you about the future? Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson poses these questions as part of The Tomorrow Project, an initiative to investigate not only the future of computing but also the broader implications on our lives and the planet. Science and technology have progressed to the point where what we build is only constrained by the limits of our own imaginations. The future is not a fixed point in front of us that we are all hurtling helplessly towards. The future is built everyday by the actions of people. The Tomorrow Project engages in ongoing discussions with superstars, science fiction authors and scientists to get their visions for the world that’s coming and the world they’d like to build.
The future is Brian David Johnson’s business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called “future casting” – using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Fake Plastic Love, Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories and the forthcoming This Is Planet Earth). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.
In a very special edition of Rum Doings, Nick and John sit down with Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, and MakieLab founder and former head of Channel 4 Games, Alice Taylor. Just like John and Nick, they too are a married couple, one half obsessed with copyright issues, the other with games. It only made sense.
For some reason we chose to make Nick sit in an echo chamber – sometimes he needs to be kept aside for our safety. We begin discussing Disney, considering dark rides as an art form, the nature of their theme parks’ sponsorship, and the consequences of their idealism. Which is the most evil games publisher of the day, did Blackbird destroy the internet, and are Adobe in trouble?
What happens when printers print something better than themselves? And then as inevitably as day turns into zombie apocalypse, we turn to intellectual property law. What copyright issues will 3D printing lead to? What code is running on our computers against our will? And will our predictions of the future always be “insufficiently weird”.
Amazingly we get onto the economy of Star Trek, via the consequences of teleporters. There is much discussion of the consequences of new technology on, well, everything. And then comes piracy, geocoding, and the surprise appearance of LittleBigPlanet developer, Luke Petre. Finally, we move on to talking about MakieLab’s project to develop 3D toys linked to online gaming.
Big thanks to Cory and Alice (and Luke!) for joining us!
http://botherer.org/2011/07/01/rum-doings-episode-76-special-cory-doctorow-alice-taylor/
Tagged with npr pod self-publishing sci-fi books print-on-demand
What does the future look like from the past? This exciting program with three people that could not better represent the intelligentsia of futurism circa 1970. This recording is from a radio program called “Sound on Film”, a series on films and the people who make them. This episode is entitled “2001–Science Fiction or Man’s Future?” Recorded May 7th, 1970. Joseph Gelman is the moderator.
At the time of this recording Arthur C. Clarke had recently collaborated on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick. Alvin Toffler’s mega-influential book, Future Shock, is about to be published. And Margaret Mead is the world’s foremost cultural anthropologist.
An intriguing conversation that still has relevance today.
2001–Science Fiction or Man’s Future?
Length–54:18
http://www.sfoha.org/arthur-c-clarke-alvin-toffler-and-margaret-mead-on-mans-future/
Cory Doctorow and the Boing Boing Boing team talk to William Gibson about Spook Country.
From http://odeo.com/episodes/16091713-Boing-Boing-Boing-015-William-Gibson
Climb in your Zeppelin, grab a self-burning book, and prepare for the first Incomparable Podcast, in which we discuss "The City and The City," "The Windup Girl," "For The Win," and more. Plus we mispronounce the names of writers.
The Incomparable Participants: Glenn Fleishman, Scott McNulty, Dan Moren, and Jason Snell. The Incomparable Theme Song composed by Christopher Breen.
Prominently mentioned in this Incomparable episode:
Also mentioned:
http://www.theincomparable.com/2010/08/1-well-always-have-zeppelins-1.html
"Inception" has put sci-fi back in the movies, with mixed reviews. We look at the best science fiction films of all time. With guests A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times, and Annalee Newitz, critif for io9.com.
Tagged with film science fiction sci-fi crticism
This article was written for Scroll magazine number two, on the theme of “place”, where it appeared in edited form as “Disrupting the Conceptual Metaphors of the Web”:
http://scrollmagazine.com/number-2/conceptual-metaphors
We’ve developed an array of metaphors for talking about the intangible spaces of the web. Maybe it’s time to unshackle ourselves from some of them.
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