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Flooded London
Film and media studio Squint/Opera has created a series of images illustrating life in 2090 London, after the seas have risen. The images are a mixture of photography, 3D modeling and digital editing which imitate Victorian landscape paintings. The scenes depict a rather halcyon existence; the artists apparently feel that after 80 years everybody will…
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Classic Young Adult SF
io9 has a list of six “Pre-Potter” novels that might hook young readers on science fiction. It’s a nice sampling of classic authors, and it’s hard to fault their choices. They mention one Heinlein juvie (The Rolling Stones), although I think I’d probably choose something like Have Space Suit, Will Travel or Red Mars Planet…
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Earth’s Messages to Aliens
The latest Alt Text at Wired explores the various messages we’ve sent in an attempt to contact alien intelligence. It’s been a long time since I actually shot a beverage out of my nose, but the “Pioneer Plaques” bit did me in. Link
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Boundary Disputes
Over at the Futurismic blog, Blasphemous Geometries has an essay exploring the arbitrariness of defining a work as “science fiction” (and also of defining an SF work as belonging to a particular subgenre). His argument is that we shouldn’t try to do either: If somebody points to something and calls it science fiction, then by…
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Tales of the Singularity
Michael at Vivtek was thinking about the accelerating time just before the Singularity, when all kinds of weird stuff is occurring. He realized that it would be a perfect environment for folk tales, so he’s writing some. So far he’s got “Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs,” “Lord Cthulhu Walks the Desert,” and…
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Martian Skies
The atmosphere of Mars is hundreds of times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere, but it can support dust devils, wind storms, and clouds. The current six live probes are sending back thousands of images of the surface, but there are only a few showing atmospheric phenomena. Boston.com has a collection of some of the best images,…
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Mozilla Makes Me Happy
Firefox 3.0 was released a couple of days ago, to great geekly acclaim. The browser has a new Easter egg, accessible by typing about:robots in the address bar. (Click the thumbnail to view full size) Also click the “Try Again” button for a bonus reference. (via The Presurfer)
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Where the Hell is Matt?
This has absolutely no relationship to science fiction, but it makes me awfully happy. My favorite bit is North Korea, at the 1:52 mark.
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Things That Have Amused Me Recently
“The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.” — William Gibson “Instead, they celebrate the pan-denominational Wookiee Life Day, which isn’t as much celebrated by Star Wars fans around this time of year as it is observed, like the anniversary of an atrocity.” — SciFi Scanner, about the infamous…
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Received in email …
The New York Times, among other world newspapers, has published a new Hubble photograph of distant galaxies colliding. Of course, astronomers have had pictures of colliding galaxies for quite some time now. But with the vastly improved resolution provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, you can actually see the lawyers rushing to the scene ……