The Weekly Ansible, 50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read (by China Mieville) Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Lester Bangs on how to write great nonfiction Photo by Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress. Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Each week we put together a collection of stories on a theme; this week’s theme is how those stories get written. Truman Capote, George Plimpton • New York Times • January 1966 A conversation about a new art form called “creative journalism,” conducted the same month In Cold Blood was published. “Twelve years ago I began to train myself, for the purpose of this sort of book, to transcribe conversation without using a tape-recorder. Katie Roiphe • Paris Review • Summer 2009 An interview with Talese on his career and daily writing routine. “INTERVIEWER: How do you write? Emily Brennan • Guernica • September 2012 An interview with Katherine Boo about how you cover the world’s poorest. George Orwell • Gangrel • June 1946 Notes for the next generation.
Behold the incredible places where we'll build cities in space Another thought provoking article at io9. Europa is a must-go-now destination. Forget about the very entertaining film of the same name, I want to see a global effort to send a submersible probe, outfitted with a drill to find passage beneath it's icy surface, and I don't want to wait twenty years for this to happen. The exploration, militarization and colonization of our solar systems jurisdiction is "crucial" to the survival of our species. For now...I believe that we should concentrate on building large ships and probe our system bodies. <—-don't take that statement someplace other than what it was written to mean. I like the idea of planetary bases, but if radiation is one of our largest enemies, maybe a synthetic atmosphere is a nice goal. If we create an artificial atmosphere, wouldn't that be the best shield to deflect radiation and even meteors? And yes, I know this is fanciful thinking, but so was the Star Trek communicator 40 years ago. Hmmm...
Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross Gondar primulon, Earthling! Welcome to the free CC-licensed ebook! We know that there's no way we could keep you from getting a free copy of this from some dodgy corner of the Internet. Rather than send you off to the kind of site you'd better visit through a proxy with your cookies turned off, we're giving you this-here free, pristine, hand-crafted ebook in a variety of formats. USA: Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free) Google Books (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Apple iBooks (DRM-free) Amazon Booksense (will locate a store near you!) Canada: Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Chapters/Indigo Amazon.ca This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. You are free: to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution. More info here: See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
Science Fiction Does Something Way Better Than Predict The Future Isn't it plausible to say it has created the future as well. SciFi has influenced so many people, maybe influenced some to the point where they wanted to create what they have loved for so long. Examples are everywhere, especially with our latest technology. Ofcourse it does that. Pick up a book like Stand on Zanzibar, and do a little research, and it is easy to find examples of people who took inspiration from there to ideas, and ultimately to processes of creation. But even on a more general / collective level, perspectives that become internalised by social dynamics, the group level of human perception, pave the road for those groups to create conditions and circumstances that follow (and fill) anticipations and expectations created by what and how groups internalise concepts.
The History of Rome by Titus Livius, in 6 vols. About this Title: Livy’s History of Rome begins with its founding and continues up to the reign of Augustus. Copyright information: The text is in the public domain. Fair use statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. The Matrix Virtual Theatre Matrix Virtual Theatre Wachowski Brothers Transcript Nov. 6, 1999 Welcome to the first live Virtual Theatre presentation in the world! Tonight you'll be able to watch The Matrix with special guests Andy and Larry Wachowski, the creators of the film. WachowskiBros: Hi! ILoveNatPortman says: Can you give any information on the sequels, or even confirm their existence? blindrocket says: Do you practice Martial Arts? AgentMartin says: Why didn't you both do the commentary on the DVD, time restraints? Hiryu says: Which Anime inspired you the most and why? AgentMartin says: Is there anything in The Matrix which you weren't too happy with; wished you could have done differently? blindrocket says: Would you consider yourselves computer nerds? AgentMartin says: Were you excited about DVD as a medium for your movies to go to the homes of the masses? Enigma says: What is the role or faith in the movie? Peter says: Will there be a directors' cut of The Matrix with any deleted scenes or out-takes?
Appian's Roman History The Author, the Manuscripts For now, only the Civil Wars, and only the English translation: although there is, that I know of, no Greek original of the work online anywhere, I do not plan to enter it myself, since those, now few, who read Greek will very likely have access to the TLG. For Appian's Foreign Wars, the links, in italics, are to the English translation at Livius. There is also a Greek text and an English translation online at Perseus. Translation The English translation is that by Horace White, first published in 1913 as part of the Loeb Classical Library. As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. The transcription is being minutely proofread. Edition Used
5 Essential Frank Herbert Novels That Aren't About Dune There are probably several schools on this. One school (of which I'm a member) would be that God Emperor (the fourth book) basically jumped the shark (or maybe the shark was jumped somewhere in Children Of Dune, even) and that while Herbert may have been getting back into the driver's seat right before he died, Chapterhouse: Dune isn't really good enough to justify slogging through its two predecessors. So you can safely just read the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children Of Dune) and pretend the rest never happened. The second school, I believe, would be that God Emperor Of Dune is Frank Herbert's masterpiece (or something close to it) and you really need to read it (and Dune, of course), and then the remaining books in the original sextet become essential filler. As for the sequels and prequels co-authored by Frank Herbert's son, Brian, allegedly from Frank Herbert's notes: there's an even wider divide between people who think the Brian Herbert/Kevin J. Dune Heretics of Dune
Larry Niven – Flash Crowd | FROM EDGE to edge and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway. Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Jerryberry Jansen lived in what had been a seaside motel halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco. The east end of Wilshire Boulevard was a most ordinary T-intersection between high, blocky buildings. The mall had been a walkway when displacement booths were no more than a theorem in quantum mechanics. The explosive growth of the mall riot has taken enforcement agencies by surprise. For Eric Jansen and his family, displacement booths came as a disaster. In the morning there were messages stored in his phone. „Hello? Wash Evans was five feet four inches tall. „Sound is only part of it.
A Mosque Among The Stars available for free! | Islam and Science Fiction A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book. This means that you can download it for free and share with others as long as you dont make any changes to it and also do it for free. So without much further ado here is where you can download the book. Download the Book For the readers who are coming to this website for the first time be sure to check out my other sci-fi related Art-Project – Silicon Arabic.