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w00t Indeed
The Phoenix Twitter feed reports: Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever! Phoenix was keeping an eye on some bright stuff at the bottom of a trench, and it sublimated. Link (via BoingBoing)
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Robots That Suck at Their Jobs
Cracked Magazine has put together a list of classic movie robots that are actually really bad at what they do. I hadn’t really considered this before, but yeah…they do suck. That is of course the real problem with R2: He’s just a little rolling Deus Ex Machina device, who can pull out the right tool…
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Stross in Second Life This Saturday
Charles Stross, whose novel Halting State explores virtual worlds and augmented reality, will be a guest in Second Life on Saturday, June 21, from 1-2:30 pm SLT (which is Pacific Time in the real world). He’ll be appearing at Sophrosyne’s Special Salon in Extropia, a large futurist/transhumanist city. He plans to discuss the Singularity in…
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Y’Know, He’s Got a Point
John Scalzi has an article about SF movies over at SciFi Scanner, and he makes an interesting observation: In science fiction, unlike every other movie genre, “classic” does not automatically equal “good.” Gojira and its dozens of sequels are so bad that if there was any honesty in the world, people would have to admit…
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Eyewitness to History
This isn’t exactly SF, but it’s mighty cool. Let’s pretend that it somehow involves Alternate History and move on. This site, created by a digital publisher of educational programming, bills itself as “Your ringside seat to history – from the Ancient World to the present.” It presents historical data about various events, along with eyewitness…
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The Name Makes Me Wince a Little
The Isle of Thanet in Kent, England is doing a little terraforming. They’re placing an astonishing 220 acres of land under glass so they can grow vegetables year ’round. The 1.3 million plants will all be grown hydroponically, resulting in a relatively small carbon footprint. When the greenhouse is fully functional it will increase the…
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Alternate History
It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Worth 1000, where Photoshop gods go to play. I like their recent Alternate History contest. They’ve had similar themes previously, too: Part 2 Part 1
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Pink Raygun: SF Site for Women
Pink Raygun is a fan site that focuses on the modern fangirl, describing itself as “everything you’d expect from a genre site, but girly.” Editor Lisa Fary originally launched the site because she couldn’t find a place where women were having fun with science fiction and “just enjoying the sheer geekery of it.” Their argument…
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Hard SF That’s Actually Hard
io9 makes a good point: Many lists of books that claim to be “hard” SF–in the sense of being rigorously scientific–either include works that are only hard if you squint (like Dune, where you’ve got people folding space with their minds) or don’t explore new technologies. As they put it, “It’s as if most definitions…
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SciFiSource: Huge SF Directory
First launched in 1999, SciFiSource bills itself as “The Ultimate Science Fiction Directory.” It’s a portal devoted entirely to SF Websites, with over 2,500 currently listed. The links are broken down into general categories, and there’s a basic search function. They’re about to roll out a redesign with more advanced search capabilities and even more…