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Archive for April, 2003

Space tourism

Category: science/fiction

News from the space tourism industry, with nice photographs of the spacecraft.

Stross & Doctorow

Category: science/fiction

They’re writing a story together online. You can see the work progress, including discussions about how it should evolve.

La pensée du jour

Category: Uncategorized

Entendu ce matin sur la RTBF (merci Javier) dans un reportage sur l’Irak :

“Donc l’avenir n’est pas encore terminé.”

Starship Troopers

Category: science/fiction

Reading Adam Roberts’ Science Fiction (Routledge New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2000), I couldn’t help being infuriated by this (about Starship Troopers) :

“Altering the racial identity of the hero in Verhoeven’s 1997 film of the book went some way towards producing a more straightforwardly fascist text. This is not the point.”

Well, I don’t know what is the point, but it is absurd to go on pretending not to notice that Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is a text about fascism (and more precisely the american brand of fascism) and not a fascist text. The same cannot be said of Heinlein’s book, although the protagonist is black. Recommended screening : the Starship Troopers dvd with audio commentary by Verhoeven.

Ghost in the Shell

Category: science/fiction

Yet another paper on the major Kusanagi, by Mobina Hashmi :

“To conclude this paper, I want to briefly touch on some of the problems raised by Ghost in the Shell endorsement of a dispersed disembodied consciousness. I prefer an understanding of cyborgs as highly technological constructions which bring the body back into technological discourse, not as something to be transcended through technology, but as something integrated within it that add a whole new set of variables that cannot be easily explained or controlled. (…) The desire to remove bodies from this weave is the desire to ignore the structures of race and gender privilege that make it possible for some bodies to be “invisible” while others cannot-and do not necessarily want to-obtain the same kind of transcendence.”

Empire of Bones

Category: science/fiction

Just finished : Empire of Bones, by Liz Williams, transformations (including genetic ones) and mixed feelings of a Phoolan Devi-like female protagonist in front of posthuman alien colonialism. Very nice indeed.

Tron and the users

Category: science/fiction

Saw yesterday, for the first time in (too many) years, Tron (while eating foie gras, it was great). It’s still very beautiful and since the last time I have seen Aelita, Metropolis, etc, so that beauty is not so alien anymore. What was striking this time : the religious and a bit silly relationship between the program-characters in the virtual world and their users in the flesh and blood world and the fact that those users are also the programmers. There is no difference between those two categories, it was the beginning of the eighties. Surely, the film would be very different today. Also suddenly the temptation of making a new audio dubbing for the film to make it more precise : ins’t it after all the political struggle of free softwares against a big bad corporate and proprietary Master Control Program with a lot of security issues?

McLeod’s blog

Category: science/fiction

And now, Ken McLeod has a blog. He’s one of the best scifi writers. Try it.

Maps

Category: science/fiction

On the global network of dreams you can explore maps of writers, movies or bands : the closer they are, the more likely an overlap in their audience. Overlap in audience as only criteria is a bit simple, but still, it’s nice. I tried Bruce Sterling.

Barcelona

Category: science/fiction

Just got back from Barcelona (one of these days we’ll explain why we were there as it is manga&scifi related) so I can start blogging again. Loads of manga translated in Spanish, some of them I had never heard of. Even if my understanding of Spanish is limited, it is still significantly better than my Japanese ^_^ so I bought some of them. If it’s the same for you, you can get an idea of what’s available on the spanish market on www.mangaes.com