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Time to doubt

Category: science/fiction

“35 years on from events that never took place, there are still many gullible people who believe that men went to the Moon back in 1968, and 6 months later landed on it, so here is the evidence which proves otherwise.

Back in the 70’s many people worldwide had doubt that the Moon landings were for real, but there was no material available upon which to base an investigation, other than the few photo’s in a limited number of fictional/fantasy books which endorsed Apollo.

It was the INTERNET which brought about the full expose of NASA’s 35 year scam, as people worldwide now have almost full access to NASA’s web site pictures, and can see for themselves how the pictures have been doctored with false backgrounds. Before 97 it was not possible to see these pictures, however all are now available.” […]

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Astropreneur

Category: science/fiction

source:Washington Business Forward
http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2001-10/firstforward/

Arlington, VA-based space-tourism company Space Adventures (SA), instrumental in Tito’s highly publicized docking at the International Space Station, is banking on the survival of these travel titans. Founded in 1997 by 27-year-old astropreneur Eric Anderson, Space Adventures has raised $22 million in equity investment and bond financing. Geologist Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. senator and astronaut, will lead the Antarctica expedition early next year.

“People are still looking for excitement and adventure in their lives,” says Anderson, who’s taken seven zero-gravity flights himself. Anderson, a University of Virginia alum, charges between $2,000 and $200,000 for a variety of aerial and terrestrial tours – including orbital flight-qualification packages, supersonic jet flights and centrifuge training, which simulates the high-gravity re-entry environment.

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7th Workshop On Space And The Arts”

Category: science/fiction

CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE FEBRUARY 29TH 2004

“SPACE: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS”
The “7th Workshop On Space And The Arts”

18-21 May 2004, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Continue Reading »

Victorian Robots

Category: science/fiction

(read in slashdot)
The Boilerplate was a prototype soldier built in 1893 to resolve potential conflicts between the nations, …

more like this on Big Red Hair

Ken Mac Leod: assimilation

Category: science/fiction

in an interview of Ken Mac Leod, by Ernest Lilley

SFR: Which culture will assimilate which? Communism, Capitalism, or Islam?

Ken: Capitalism will assimilate everything that exists in the world today, no question. The interesting question is what happens then. Professor Meghnad Desai of the London Schoolo of Economics has recently written an interesting book called Marx’s Revenge, in which he argues that what happens then is that capitalism begins to press hard against its limits, and socialism comes on the agenda for the first time.

Ken: Islam is a religion, not a mode of production, and is not counterposed to capitalism. Communism is a potential mode of production which, in the words of Lenin, ‘requires the joint efforts of several advanced countries, which do not include Russia’. Well, today Russia is arguably an advanced country, but it could only reach socialism through joint efforts with other advanced countries. Stalin’s ‘socialism in one country’ was always a utopia, and a reactionary one at that. There was never the slightest chance of the Stalinist states assimilating the capitalist countries. Nor is there the slightest chance now of the Islamic countries assimilating or overwhelming the largely secular West.

The West could destroy itself, and it’s possible – if the destruction wasn’t universal – that the successor civilization would be Muslim, but then *they* would be ‘the advanced capitalist countries’ and the religion would have to bend to that – as it was beginning to do, in Moorish Spain for instance, before it was over-run by Christians and sank into a long sulk.

SFR: You don’t seem to give faith based cultures much staying power in you fiction, is that because you see them as antithetical to advanced tech and hence limited in their ability to propagate themselves through space?

Ken: I don’t see faith-based cultures as antithetical to advanced tech, at all. Islamic societies were among the most advanced in the world in the Middle Ages. There’s no reason why a space-going civilization couldn’t be religious, so long as the religion’s dogmas didn’t rule out space exploration. As to my fiction, the future culture in The Sky Road has in the story endured for centuries, and is either Deist or pantheist, and is reaching out to space. The Christian fundamentalist Beulah City, in The Star Fraction, is a kind of like Singapore – repressive, but not anti-technological. The religion that really gets the boot in my books is that of the Greens and ‘their evil goddess, Gaia.’

Embrace the Decay

Category: science/fiction

info from the NEWSgrist newsletter

Embrace the Decay
by Bruce Sterling

(unfortunately you would need the infamous Makkkkromedia plugin)

MOCA DIGITAL GALLERY
Launch date: September 2003

Embrace the Decay is an interactive, web-based project about the
destructive relationship between computers and typewriters. The
artwork turns the web-surfing computer-user into an unwilling
typewriter clerk. But the era of the typewriter is over and beyond
all retrieval: the dead machine rusts and crumbles, its pages fade
and rot in surprising ways, and it is finally, ritually entombed.

“Viewers will feel an ache of pain and wonder as the once-glorious
typewriter and all its works are methodically destroyed by electronic
means,” says Sterling.

Bruce Sterling is the author of nine novels, three of which were
selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He has
published short stories and works of nonfiction, as well as contributed
regularly to Wired magazine since its inception. His most recent book,
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, was published 12/02.

Heinlein

Category: science/fiction

today in the bus, I was reading the excellent “American Science Fiction And The Cold War” by David Seed.

the book

I was beginning the chapter dedicated to Robert Heinlein(definitively more to say about him). Back home, a Google search has lead me to a quiz that pictures your profile as an Heinlein characters.
The result:

Starship Troopers
You belong in Starship Troopers. Your idea of a
good time is bouncing across an alien
battlefield blasting the foes of humanity into
extinction.

Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?
brought to you by Quizilla

Bionic Ear Blog

Category: science/fiction

“Bionic Ear Blog
With apologies to Jamie Sommers. Adventures of a woman gaining a new and improved ear. ”

http://www.meryl.net/ci/

The diary of a woman having a cochlear implant to improve her deficient hearing.
Really moving.
The diary deals with a lot of issues and feelings: scientifical approach, day-to-day meditation, insights on the health care system, and the slow learning process to understand words without lipreading…

Just another link to a post where she explains the artificality of linking sounds and words

http://www.meryl.net/ci/archives/001268.html

Everything you don’t want to know …

Category: science/fiction

…when writing fan fiction

is to be found there

blue origin

Category: science/fiction

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and SCI-FI novelist, Neal Stephenson paid a visit to the NASA…

from wired.com

Why did the founder of Amazon.com and a famous cyberpunk novelist ask for a tour of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab last February? Jeff Bezos and Neal Stephenson weren’t saying. But the Caltech rocket scientists who run JPL hoped that the visit by the billionaire bookseller and his star author, both known space buffs, would be followed up by a major donation – perhaps even enough to pay for the next generation of space telescopes. They rolled out the red carpet for Bezos and Stephenson, briefed them on new projects, and treated both to an elegant sit-down meal.

—> read more on wired.com

from newsweek:

What is blue origin? The name adorns a blue awning outside a 53,000-square-foot, one-story warehouse on a desolate side street along Seattle’s Duwamish Waterway. SUVs and motorcycles are lined up out front seven days a week, often late into the night. There’s no record of the company in the city’s phone books, and its workers will tell their neighbors only that the firm pursues scientific research. But the databases of the state of Washington offer more tantalizing clues. They reveal that Blue Origin is actually a space- research company and that the business was registered in 2000 from an office in Seattle’s old Pacific Medical Center, a building that since 1998 has been occupied by the world’s largest Internet retailer, Amazon.com.

In other words, Jeff Bezos is getting into the space business.

read more on newsweek