HUPOMNEMATA

Rumour is one of the characters in the brand new Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell: Innocence is named after Donna Haraway. (haven’t seen it yet)

Six sci fi writers were interwiewed about the future: here you can read their views.

(courtesy them again)

It’s been a long time without a robot in this blog, but this one deserves all the attention it gets :
“To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity. ”
article from New Scientist.

“The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were created in 1998 by the Gaylactic Network to honor works in science fiction, fantasy and horror which include positive explorations of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters, themes, or issues… The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards are juried with an open nomination process and are presented in a variety of categories each year, with works released in the previous calendar year eligible for consideration. Categories for 2004 are Best Novel, Best Short Fiction and Best Other Work. In addition, each year a handful of works originally released prior to the creation of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards are inducted into the Hall of Fame.”

And the award for the best novel went to Nalo Hopkinson for her excellent Salt Road, which makes us really happy. Nalo was one of our guest during the project Stitch and Split in Barcelona. It was a real pleasure to meet her and she did a great lecture (you can download it in mp3 or ogg).

More details about the awards can be found on the gaylactic spectrum site. (note : Buffy was shortlisted in the other works category!)

Not so long ago, Bruce Sterling gave a lecture at Microsoft (gosh, how completely shocking ;-). If you wonder what it was about there is a complete transcript
there.

Giant robots do exist. In Japan.

link

“Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody — except the flight crew — could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.”

Read Charlie Stross on line.

Some days ago I stumbled upon this through slashdot. It’s a project by the Oxford English Dictionary, a collaboration with sf fans to find the earliest appearances of specific science fiction terms. The list in itself is already quite beautiful. Here’s a short part of their intro :

“This page is a pilot effort for the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the words associated with a special field of interest are collected so that knowledgeable aficionados can help the OED find useful examples of these words. This, our first project, is science fiction literature.

The OED aims to include all words that are frequently used in any field, and attempts to find the earliest example of every sense of every word it includes. For SF the OED needs earlier examples of terms it already includes, early examples of terms that have been slated for future inclusion, and any examples of terms that have not yet caught the editors’ attention but are common in SF. Words used infrequently, words associated chiefly with a single author, or words so specialized that they are found only in a single subgenre, are not high priorities for inclusion. “

I have to admit that I enjoyed a lot of Orson Scott Card’s books. But I think it’s over. I’m going to find it difficult to open another one. The last two essays he published on his website are just really too absurd and stupid.

In the last one, he writes about Mel Gibson’s “Passion”, a film that he finds to be perfect. With some nice parts, like this one : ” The most obvious such fictionalization is the way the film depicts Satan. I was astonished, after the fact, to find that Satan was played by a woman, Rosalinda Celentano. But the way Satan is presented, his face a mockery of tenderness and concern, surrounded by images of maggots, serpents, decay, deformity, I could not imagine a better depiction.” Safe assumption, operative words here are “Satan played by a woman, could not imagine a better depiction”. You can read the rest there.

Last week, it was about homosexual marriage, and it was even worse : “The dark secret of homosexual society — the one that dares not speak its name — is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally. It’s that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual “marriage.” ”

game over. no more Card.

“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.” […]

read it