The future is already here, I'm just trying to aggregate it.

Read more fiction.

I used to read a lot of non-fiction, especially business books. In fact I’m still on a few publishers lists for receiving advanced copies of business books. But I find myself reading more science fiction, and I’m really enjoying the genre some call progressive or speculative science fiction. This genre also seems to cover cyberpunk, and dystopian genres (I could be wrong here on the genus and families of fiction types, but I think this one of those things that isn’t generally agreed on). 

Non-fiction can tell you what happened, or at best take a guess at what is happening, but fiction tells you what could be. Even when non-fiction tries to explain what’s happening and what is yet to come, they’re still really just telling you about the past. And conversely, even when science fiction is trying to write about the past (like with steampunk) they’re still telling you about the future. 

Non-fiction is about how we reacted to something. Science fiction is about how we would react to something. And even though there are a lot of exceptions and I still read my share of great non-fiction, for me, understanding how people react to change (which is the core of what sci-fi is about) is far more valuable that someone trying to explain to me what already happened. 

Fiction and the future of tech are so interconnected as to make you wonder if there really is any difference.  I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.” (via Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer. - Slate Magazine)

Fiction and the future of tech are so interconnected as to make you wonder if there really is any difference. 

I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.”

(via Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer. - Slate Magazine)

Brilliant. You really should check out Tim’s collection of short stories, Paintwork. 

(via tim maughan books » Paintwork – the movie)

I dance around the edges of genre and what is conventionally termed “literary” writing, although that distinction is increasingly meaningless. “Literature” tends to follow the Virginia Woolf mode: the ordinary mind on an ordinary day. It’s about depicting the human experience with as little in the way of distraction as possible. Sometimes you can even see the layers of life being peeled away to expose the essence of humanity. And, with the greatest of respect, that is a mystical perspective on what it means to be a person, which belongs to another century. It’s an inheritance of Romanticism.

Humans exist in the interaction of the interior and the exterior worlds. Technology and science and fantasy and possibility and so on are all part of that. Stripping them away is a delusion, a quest for an authenticity which does not exist. Any writing which refuses to engage with science and technology runs the risk of exiling itself to a fictional 1992. Look: if you live in a world where you can print human organs on a polymer frame but you won’t acknowledge the existence of email in your fiction, what are you really doing? You’re not talking about the ordinary day. And someone who doesn’t use email in professional life is not an ordinary person any more.

Talking to the Free Word about the Kitschies, and Angelmaker. (via harkaway)

Something that bugs me about most fiction is when the author just ignores the existence of any technology beyond the telephone. 

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.

Samuel Delaney (via likestepsonthemoon)

(via stoweboyd)

Arcfinity: Is Tim Maughan's Limited Edition the best short story of 2012?

arcfinity:

We think so, and we’re not alone: the story has been shortlisted for this year’s BSFA Award.

Judge for yourself: here’s Limited Edition in all its great handsomeness, complete with striking original artwork by Robert Carter. If you like it, vote for it!

image

Limited Edition (c) Tim Maughan, 2012

first appeared in Afterparty Overdrive (Arc 1.3), Autumn 2012.

This was one of his better stories. Good stuff. 

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Ann Patchett, And the Winner of the Pulitzer Isn’t (via underpaidgenius)