MachineMachine /stream - tagged with fiction http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net Cybernetic Sherlock http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/15516449415

Cybernetic Sherlock

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]]> Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:45:36 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/15516449415 Never go with a cultist to a second location http://www.metafilter.com/110638/Never-go-with-a-cultist-to-a-second-location?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter/never-go-with-a-cultist-to-a-second-location-metafilter Alan Moore talks about HP Lovecraft, The Courtyard and Neonomicon (audio) http://t.co/IZyHeXiW ]]> Sun, 18 Dec 2011 03:05:45 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/110638/Never-go-with-a-cultist-to-a-second-location?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter/never-go-with-a-cultist-to-a-second-location-metafilter Out of Imagination Came a New Online World http://www.nytimes.com//the-new-york-times-breaking-news-world-news-amp-multimedia Out of Imagination Came a New Online World: http://t.co/n5mJpqB6 / '#NealStephenson doesn’t like talking about how he predicted the future.' ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:06:07 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com//the-new-york-times-breaking-news-world-news-amp-multimedia Metalosis Maligna - An Extraordinary disease http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtXMyAOop3s&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 27 Nov 2011 04:16:45 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtXMyAOop3s&feature=youtube_gdata From Beyond http://notatwiki.dk/images/8/8f/H._P._Lovecraft_-_From_Beyond.pdf/untitled H.P.Lovecraft "From Beyond" : http://t.co/hW7G4EXd #Lovecraft #ShortStory #horror #pdf ]]> Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:24:30 -0700 http://notatwiki.dk/images/8/8f/H._P._Lovecraft_-_From_Beyond.pdf/untitled Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html But the invasion of robot-books is unsettling for another reason. I think we can all agree that it’s O.K. for robots to take over unpleasant jobs — like cleaning up nuclear waste. But how could we have allowed them to commandeer one of the most gratifying occupations, that of author? Which brings me back to Lambert M. Surhone. Might he be a robot? Reading the fine print, I traced some of Surhone’s books to a VDM branch office in the island nation of Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. I called. As the faraway phone rang, I fantasized about what… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 07:04:52 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html The Cyberspace Real (Between Perversion and Trauma) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship":… ]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:33:41 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real The Battle Over Zomia http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/ Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as "slash and burn"), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous… ]]> Mon, 05 Sep 2011 05:20:41 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/ Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/sunday-review/novelists-predict-future-with-eerie-accuracy.html/novelists-predict-future-with-eerie-accuracy-nytimescom "The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting things will get worse" : http://t.co/Qxb6kZh #x ]]> Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:12:49 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/sunday-review/novelists-predict-future-with-eerie-accuracy.html/novelists-predict-future-with-eerie-accuracy-nytimescom The Things, by Peter Watts http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:13:19 -0700 http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem, himself a fluent English speaker, was always scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of two film versions of the… ]]> Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:29:33 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou: “Who Goes There” http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime-podcast/2008/04/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-1//a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-1

Discussion of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There” (A Slug of Time podcast) #TheThing #SciFi #podcast

]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:09:24 -0700 http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime-podcast/2008/04/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-1/ Flash Symposium at Birkbeck, 24th May 2011 http://dandelionnetwork.org/events/flash-symposium-shorts-on Ideal for the commute, the lunch-hour, the stolen moment: shortness necessitates the perfect user-friendly format, arguably suited to the fast paced nature of everyday contemporary urban living. At the same time such compression of structure and content allows for moments of haiku-like contemplation. This symposium has been curated to celebrate all that is great about the short form.

The first half will feature five minute papers on short forms, from fiction to poetry, from comics to GIFs. The speakers are research students from across the humanities and colleges of the University of London. The second half will… ]]> Tue, 17 May 2011 14:26:13 -0700 http://dandelionnetwork.org/events/flash-symposium-shorts-on The Philosophy of Insomnia http://chronicle.com/article/The-Philosophy-of-Insomnia/127029 Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, "When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who loves life and wisdom will take no more sleep than is necessary for health." Clement of Alexandria echoed, "There is no use of a sleeping man, as there is not of a dead man. ... But whoever of us is most solicitous for living the true life, and for entertaining noble sentiments, will keep awake for as long time as possible."
"The need of sleep is not in… ]]> Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:44:52 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/The-Philosophy-of-Insomnia/127029 Loving the Ghost in the Machine: Aesthetics of Interruption http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312 In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As electricity has become the basic element of the world we live in, the steady hum of power grids and their flowing immaterial essences slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of everyday machinery, the ghostly rapport has also relocated into the domain of current fluctuations, radio interference and misread data.

Early telegraph experimenters… ]]> Sat, 09 Apr 2011 02:17:47 -0700 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312 The Temporary Autonomous Zone http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political… ]]> Sat, 22 Jan 2011 06:43:13 -0700 http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html When new narratives meet old brains http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. "We" refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. "Narratives" refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's… ]]> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html Myths of a Near Future: Simon Sellars, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale on J.G. Ballard http://www.ballardian.com/myths-of-a-near-future-sellars-sterling-vale Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition.

Jordi began with a Spanish-language introduction, and then Vale followed with a 15-minute video detailing his relationship and collaborations with Ballard. Jordi’s questions… ]]> Mon, 15 Nov 2010 03:31:00 -0700 http://www.ballardian.com/myths-of-a-near-future-sellars-sterling-vale Ridley Scott goes back to Philip K. Dick for The Man In The High Castle http://io9.com/5658586/ridley-scott-goes-back-to-philip-k-dick-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle According to the Guardian Ridley Scott is producing a four-part BBC miniseries based on Philip K Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. Howard Brenton, the playwright and Spooks writer, is presently adapting the book. Its a pretty complicated story with handful of story lines that follow a variety of characters, so it's perfect miniseries fodder. It should be interesting to see if Scott keeps his miniseries set in the same time period as the book, the 1960s — we feel like he may be tempted to update it to the here and now. But either way, we're really… ]]> Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:45:00 -0700 http://io9.com/5658586/ridley-scott-goes-back-to-philip-k-dick-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle Is There Too Much Exposition in Games? http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/112/1125824p1.html "Exposition is a dirty word," was one of Kasavin's top points. Too many developers front- or back-load games with heavy exposition to create the game world instead of smartly weaving it in the game itself. This kind of world building sets up a series of... ]]> Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:31:36 -0700 http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/112/1125824p1.html