The Billion-Dollar Book of the Dead

A neat little slice of science fiction from Robin Sloan, published in MIT Technology Review: Elyse Flayme and the final flood.

Molly Khan had written six books in as many years, starting with Elyse Flayme and the Ice Queen, surprise best seller, first in the series that became the heir—at last—to Potter. Even better, this series meant something, because the crisis that faced Molly’s mythic world of Arrenia was a clear parable for climate change. The books were urgent and serious, but also fun and charming and, as Molly’s characters grew up, not a little bit sexy. They were broccoli fried in bacon fat.

[…]

Molly’s seventh book would conclude the series. There we were, proud publishers, along with our counterparts at the streaming service: perched, poised, ready to proceed into the final stage of this billion-dollar project. […]

[Via the author]

The Peripheral

I’ve not read William Gibson’s source novel, but after seeing the first two episodes I can safely say that The Peripheral on Amazon Prime looks right up my street.

I’ll certainly give them the first season to see if the mix of high technology, alternative time lines and rich, powerful people from the future with their own motivations for what they’re doing continues to develop in an interesting direction.

Could end well, could go off the rails the way Nolan and Joy’s stewardship of the TV version of Westworld did. I’m pretty sure it’ll be an intriguing ride either way.

Target Acquired

I was curious about the TV adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife and had it on my list of shows I’d take a look at somewhere down the line. Then I came across Abigail Nussbaum’s review of the first season at Strange Horizons:

At this point, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that this review of The Time Traveler’s Wife is a rave. Let me hasten to correct that impression. The Time Traveler’s Wife is hilariously, deliriously bad. It’s everything that critics of the book have been complaining about for nearly twenty years, multiplied by every complaint that Moffat’s critics have leveled at him for roughly the same amount of time. And, like the show’s Henry and Clare themselves—a couple who have intimate conversations in a completely normal speaking voice while out in public, for example arguing over whether Henry has been ogling a woman on the subway while sitting right next to said woman—it’s the sort of pairing where you find yourself happy that these two toxic disaster zones have found each other, because at least they won’t impose their dysfunction on anyone else.

I realise that was meant as a warning, but how can I not move this programme up my list now?

Emulation

Thanks to Charlie Stross for pointing out Lena, an short story by qntm written in the format of excerpt from a version of Wikipedia hailing from a distinctly nightmarish timeline:

This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Miguel Acevedo.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. […]

If you find yourself thinking that sounds neat, be sure to follow the link and read the remainder of the entry.

I think probably enthusiasts for mind uploading are wildly underestimating the complexity of capturing a snapshot of a mind, let alone the resources required to do something useful1 with all that data afterwards. Then again, a few decades from now who can say how much bandwidth and processing power it’ll be feasible2 to throw at the task?

Chilling stuff…

[Via Charlie’s Diary]


  1. Useful to whom, exactly? Useful how?  

  2. Trivial, even.  

Archived

A couple of years ago I posted about reading Incorruptible, a Peter Watts story from the X-Prize’s Seat 14C competition1.

I was pleased to find earlier today that a couple of years ago the DUST podcast/film network put out audio adaptations2 of some of the stories from the competition.

Unfortunately Incorruptible wasn’t one of the stories DUST adapted,3 but that wasn’t by any means the only worthwhile story included in the competition so I’ve been glad to have had the chance to reacquaint myself with some of the other stories from the competition.


  1. The Seat 14 site itself is no longer online, and while the Wayback Machine claims to have older snapshots of the site’s content I can’t get any of them to come up for me right now. 

  2. Technically they put out videos, not podcasts, but judging by the the videos appear to be presented as abstract screen savers playing over audio content rather than visual adaptations of the stories being told. I’m the sort of literal-minded type who thinks that “podcast” is the term for an audio file delivered via an RSS feed, dammit, but I probably should let that go since I can also get the content as straight podcasts and listen to them. 

  3. It’s still available via the Wayback Machine’s archive. Bringing it up involved a bit of a wait, but it did pop up in the end. 

The Inheritors

Worth supporting?

The Inheritors is an intimate science-fiction short film exploring themes of race, family and belonging. Reflecting on the experiences of people with multiple-heritage, it’s a story about how societal polarisation creates walls that divide us, deprive us of love, of community, of a sense of identity, and ultimately of our deepest humanity.

[Via Orbital Operations]

Picard Season 2

Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard has been a poorly-paced tale that is so busy looking backwards that I have very little confidence that the coming third season will be worth my time, even if they are reuniting the TNG-era bridge crew and promising us “Federation starships galore”.1

On the other hand, sometimes it prompts MetaFilter FanFare comments like this and it all seems worthwhile:2

“Oh no.”
‘what’
“I just realized who the actress playing his mother reminds me of. Holly Palance.”
‘who?’
“Let’s just say that I hope ‘Look Up, Jean-Luc’ isn’t this plotline’s ‘Look at me, Damien, I love you! It’s All for You, Damien!'”
‘oh god, they wouldn’t’

Q: Jeez, Jean-Luc. I came here to teach you a lesson about romance. But I thought your Avoidant Behaviors about women were you just being, y’know, stuffy. Reserved.

(Vash told me she actually caught you doing the Picard Maneuver with a condom. C’mon man.)

I had no idea your mother made you a witness to her suicide!

Really messes up my plans for you and Laris loving it up and having the first Synth-Romulan hybrid baby; solving both my selfish Last of the Picards to Play With and making a point about growing by overcoming your deepest fears.

But no, you had to do your own thing. So now BorgRati is headed straight for the alternate dimension where AI is the dominant lifeform, from last season. The big portal full of robot tentacles? And I’ve seen enough hentai to know where that’s going.

posted by bartleby at 6:48 AM on April 15


  1. It’s crazy how often major, galaxy-threatening terrors turn out to have their roots in the histories of that one small group of Star Fleet officers, to the point where it’s starting to feel like a galaxy so small it feels like it was inspired by the works of George Lucas. 
  2. NB: That comment was posted before this week’s penultimate episode of the season, in which the first plot point mentioned turned out to be spot-on. 

Station Eleven ended

I’ll have more to say about this, but first just a quick note to confirm that now that the STARZPLAY stream of HBO’s Station Eleven has come to an end I’m delighted I went to the trouble of seeking the show out.

The story and the way they chose to tell it took a few episodes to get used to, but by the time they had trained their audience in what to expect from the story their clever, lyrical approach to adapting an existing tale paid massive dividends.

Arguments about how realistic the story of this particular post-apocalyptic pocket of human civilisation was are, in my opinion, missing the point. The author of the source material wanted to tell a story that took an optimistic view of what could happen in the wake of a ruinous pandemic given an attitude that survival was insufficient, and the showrunners seem to have honoured that by producing a show that has to be one of the highlights of what’s been a little bit of a golden age for televised speculative fiction over the last couple of years, between Station Eleven and Devs and Tales From The Loop.

Station Eleven

Given the largely positive reviews that Station Eleven got, regular readers may not be surprised to learn that I ended up shelling out for a STARZPLAY subscription with the plan of watching the ten episodes then deciding whether to let my subscription roll over for another month. There’s other content I’d been meaning to watch1 so we’ll see how long they can keep my interest.

I’m up to episode five so far, and while the show has been a bit uneven so far as they’ve introduced the characters my worries that the show might veer into a more Walking Dead-style take on the apocalypse have abated. I’m mostly enjoying some excellent acting and a cast of characters who are (so far) very much not taking the story in that sort of relentlessly grim direction.

More to say once I catch up with the end of the show, but I do have two negative points about the wider experience of watching the show:

  1. Whilst the official podcast has all the access to the cast and crew one could wish for, the content is so self-congratulatory about just how brilliant everyone was that it can be hard to take. This is why for other shows I mostly steer clear of their official podcasts, but I haven’t had time to locate a suitable non-official alternative for this show yet.
  2. The STARZPLAY app for iPadOS breaks so many of John Siracusa’s (unsolicited) rules for streaming apps it’s ridiculous and is also just horribly unreliable when it comes to just playing streaming video, full stop. Silent crashes, the app reacting to a wrong touch by returning me to the start of my episode multiple times per episode, it’s infuriating. They’re lucky the content is worth the perseverance required.

  1. I definitely need to see Counterpart from scratch, and it’d be good to finish off Fringe after I made it to the end of season 2 in an earlier watch on NowTV earlier in the pandemic.