Link tags: books

“Dune,” “Foundation,” and the Allure of Science Fiction that Thinks Long-Term — Blog of the Long Now

Comparing and contrasting two different takes on long-term thinking in sci-fi: Dune and Foundation.

In a moment of broader cultural gloominess, Dune’s perspective may resonate more with the current movie-going public. Its themes of long-term ecological destruction, terraforming, and the specter of religious extremism seem in many ways ripped out of the headlines, while Asimov’s technocratic belief in scholarly wisdom as a shining light may be less in vogue. Ultimately, though, the core appeal of these works is not in how each matches with the fashion of today, but in how they look forward through thousands of years of human futures, keeping our imagination of long-term thinking alive.

IndieWeb Events: Gardens and Streams II

September 25th, online:

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss and build.

Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius | The Walrus

On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.

A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment | The MIT Press Reader

From Mary Shelley and Edgar Rice Burroughs to John Brunner, Frank Herbert and J.G. Ballard to Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Octavia Butler.

Sci-Fi & Me – Jeremy Keith – Stay Curious Café by beyond tellerrand - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave on Wednesday evening all about my relationship with reading science fiction. There are handy chapter markers if you want to jump around.

In search of the new

Robin asked a question:

What is a work of science fiction (a book, not a movie, thanks) that could only have been written in the last ten years? AND/OR, what’s a work of science fiction that hinges on experi­ences and feelings new in the last ten years? AND/OR, what’s a work of science fiction that repre­sents the current leading edge of the genre’s specu­la­tive and stylistic devel­op­ment?

The responses make for interesting reading, especially ahead of Wednesday’s event.

Robin Rendle ･ Everything that books ought to be

I’m with Robin. Hardback books are infuriating, not least because of the ridiculous business model of only publishing hardback versions to begin with, and only releasing a paperback when you’ve lost all interest in reading the damn book.

ignore the code: Bookfeed.io

Such an elegant idea!

Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.

Small pieces, loosely joined.

archives.design

All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.

The Art of Whaling: Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships – The Public Domain Review

Scrimshaws and sketches.

Feels like a Zooniverse project waiting to happen.

Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice

A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:

The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

The case for rereading | A Working Library

Reading, especially fiction, is often referred to as an escape, but I’ve never believed that. It’s true that a great story transports you somewhere else, that returning to your life afterwards can feel like an abrupt reentry. But I think that’s less because you escaped the real world, however briefly, and more that you got a clearer look at it. A great book rearranges time: it brings both history and speculative futures into the present, into a now you can occupy and taste and feel.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

Top 10 books about remaking the future | Peter F Hamilton | Books | The Guardian

Here then are 10 stories of remaking the future that contain hope — or at least stability.

1. The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
2. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
3. Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
4. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
6. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
7. Natural History by Justina Robson
8. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
9. Way Station by Clifford D Simak
10. News from Gardenia by Robert Llewellyn

There Has Never Been a Better Time to Read Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Books - Electric Literature

Well, this is timely! Cassie mentioned recently that she was reading—and enjoying—the Earthsea books, which I had never got around to reading. So I’m reading them now. Then Craig mentioned in one of his newsletters that he’s also reading them. Now there’s this article…

To white protestors and accomplices, who say that they want to listen but are fearful of giving up some power so that we can all heal, I suggest you read the Earthsea cycle. You will need to learn to step away from the center to build a new world, and the Black majority in this fantasy series offers a better model than any white history.

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf

I’d watch this game show:

Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.

So no one told us the internet was gonna be this way | The Outline

An interview with Joanne McNeil about her new book, Lurking:

Someone who was creating, say, a small decentralized community for a specific group of people would not have luck finding investors, as opposed to Facebook, which sought to build a platform for all.

‘Sfunny, when I was on Quarantine Book Club the other day, this is exactly what I talked about one point—how Facebook (and venture capital) moved the goalposts on what constitutes success and failure on the web.