2 Science Publishers Delve Into Science Fiction 67
braindrainbahrain writes "Coincidence or conspiracy? Two new science fiction magazines have just been announced and they are both being published by more serious science publications. New Scientist magazine has announced the publication of Arc, 'A new digital magazine about the future.' Arc features such articles as 'The best time travel movie ever made' and 'The future of science fiction, games, galleries — and futurism.' They are advertising new fact and fiction from the likes of Maragret Atwood and Alastair Reynold. The MIT Technology Review has announced the TRSF, dubbed 'the first installment of a to-be-annual "hard" SF collection.' Some authors: Joe Haldeman and Cory Doctorow. As an interesting note, both publications will be printed on paper for the first ('collectable') issue only; all forthcoming ones will be e-books."
Science publishers always published SciFi (Score:5, Funny)
Science publications have always published science fiction. For example, articles and studies about "Global Warming".
--Yours,
Fox News.
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"Fox News."
They would know as the biggest purveyors of "at the moment" fiction and fantasy around. Science fiction has more credibility than Fox News.
I rather read David Brin's Sci Fi (Score:2)
Of the many sci fi novels that I've read, I do enjoy those authored by David Brin
Nice (Score:1)
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Science Fiction growing or dying? (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand, traditional publishing has been dying. No biggie, direct e-publishing is drastically more efficient. Books cost 99 cents to $2.99 (sometimes a buck or two more) and the author makes MORE money per copy sold that they would make with a $15 hardcover. No advances, and the author has to pay for editing out of pocket, but there's solutions to this. Several authors I know of would release a "beta version" of their stories as an ebook, make some money, and pay editors to help them make a cleaned up and improved version.
Not to mention that you can communicate directly with fans and get feedback immediately, rather than the letter writing days of the past.
However, I've also read that fantasy as a genre is far more lucrative than science fiction. Lots more sales, hence the reason there seems to be a shrinking number of good science fiction authors.
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead, it now looks like the world of the future is going to be far weirder and harder to understand than than we dreamed of. Humans are NOT going to just pack their stuff into spaceships and start colonizing the moons and local planets, then somehow cheat physics and do the same thing at other stars. (that will conveniently have worlds just like earth, with compatible biology and biochemistry but no sentient life)
In fact, a rational view of other future, one based on the current trajectories of how things are heading, is that human beings will NEVER colonize anywhere else. "Apes in a can" spaceship will never happen. Us short lived jumped up primates are too fragile and too dumb, instead we will bootstrap our way to creating entities that do not have our human weaknesses.
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However, I've also read that fantasy as a genre is far more lucrative than science fiction. Lots more sales, hence the reason there seems to be a shrinking number of good science fiction authors.
With extremely high-profile releases in the not too distant past like the LoTR movies and Harry-Potter-esque books, it wouldn't surprise me that fantasy is a much bigger market and therefore draws more authors. These things always have fashions though, and I'm sure sci-fi will be on the rise again some day.
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead, it now looks like the world of the future is going to be far weirder and harder to understand than than we dreamed of
...So why is that a death-knell for sci-fi? It isn't obliged to be a prediction of the future, it isn't meant to be a roadmap to the stars. It's meant to be what any other kind of fiction is: enjoyable
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So other sentient life? That leaves out the most interesting aspect of Science Fiction.
Just look at one of my favourite "old" Sci-Fi show, Space Precinct, where there is a prospering alien civilisation, where the Humans are basically the poor (and often illegal) immigrants, fleeing the economically failed Earth.
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Wait, that was a real show?
Oh... oh no...
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Uhhhh - real science fiction is almost NEVER a "show". What you watch on television is something else entirely.
Re:Science Fiction growing or dying? (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality.
Far more difficult than what? Writing a quick pulp fiction book?
Humans are NOT going to just pack their stuff into spaceships and start colonizing the moons and local planets, then somehow cheat physics and do the same thing at other stars.
Eh, while I agree that humans aren't cheating physics any time soon (never being more likely), why aren't humans going to "just pack their stuff into spaceships and start colonizing the moons and local planets"? Do you have any evidence for that assertion other than it turns out to be more difficult than some 50s sci fi writers alleged?
In fact, a rational view of other future, one based on the current trajectories of how things are heading, is that human beings will NEVER colonize anywhere else.
Uh huh. I assume you've considered such trends as declining costs of putting things into space (a trend operating over decades), declining costs of making reliable things, the human desire to go elsewhere, including into space, and other such things?
"Apes in a can" spaceship will never happen.
We have more than half a century of counterexamples.
Us short lived jumped up primates are too fragile and too dumb, instead we will bootstrap our way to creating entities that do not have our human weaknesses.
Such as longer lived, smarter humans? Or merely continuing to do difficult tasks with the remarkable intelligence we already have?
I have good news. You have somehow been transported to a planet that doesn't have the insurmountable problems which you speak of.
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I believe his point was that those dreams are economically unachievable, not technically.
Charlie Stross has made that point more clearly than either of us could:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html [antipope.org]
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html [antipope.org]
I only read those after I realized it myself - we were enjoying a review of all the episodes of "Firefly" and while I love the show, I was griping about the utter silliness of space travelers in cowboy
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Charlie Stross has made that point more clearly than either of us could:
Maybe he can. But he hasn't yet. His arguments suffer from the problem that they don't actually address actual problems of space development, exploration, or colonization. They also are often obviously wrong. Take this little blurb from "Space Cadets".
My problem, however, is that there is no equivalence between outer space and the American west.
Humans are a climax organism that is fundamentally dependent on a couple of key ecosystems. There's the one we carry around in our guts â" about a kilogram of bacteria and fungi, for a typical adult â" without which we can't even digest most of our food. And there's the ecosystem we live in. (Or ecosystems. Because of our unique horizontally-transferable tool culture we can adapt to existence in terrestrial ecosystems other than the one our ancestors coevolved with. But there are limits; we don't thrive in Antarctica, or at the bottom of the ocean trenches.) We're also somewhat dependent on our extraordinary extended phenotype, from flint hand-axes to Space Shuttles. Maintaining that phenotype is a large-scale operation supported by a penumbra of extended cultural activities that maintain the ability to maintain the phenotype â" primary school teachers, for example, don't bend metal but are absolutely vital to the activity of engineering insofar as you've got to start educating your next generation of engineers somewhere. Hence some earlier postings on this blog.
It ignores, for example, that we do thrive in Antarctica (even in the presence of the Antarctica Treaty which bans most viable economic activity) and in the seas (we just live on them rather than 20 km down), and that US-based science fiction has managed to ma
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US-based science fiction has managed to make valid comparisons between the myths of the US West and space exploration for well over 50 years.
How exactly do fictionalised retellings of historical fictions tell us anything useful in real life about space colonisation?
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US-based science fiction has managed to make valid comparisons between the myths of the US West and space exploration for well over 50 years.
How exactly do fictionalised retellings of historical fictions tell us anything useful in real life about space colonisation?
I imagine a few centuries down the road, we'll find out that they told us quite a bit about fictionalized retellings of historical space colonization. But to answer your question more accurately, they tell us the most important thing that will be needed for space colonization: motivation. What spurs people to do what they do hasn't changed since the beginning of human civilization and isn't likely to change in the next few centuries.
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Thanks. That's where he lost me, too.
A lot of the rest was TL;DR once I saw that one, plus a few more bits that are characteristic of hand-wave-ism in arguments for our space-opera future:
"Thrive" != "Survive at all with imported food, clothing, and shelter". Explain the economic model for *making* food, clothing, and shelter in Antarctica and people would be interested in changing that treaty. NB: "Greenhouse food under lights powered by a nuclear reactor" is still not "thrive" unless the antarctic co
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I don't really see us suddenly having a colonized space in a decade, or a hundred years.
I don't either. I do see a gradual rather than sudden colonization as possible in a hundred years.
It won't be like the American Wild West, it will be a slow and boring progression that wouldn't merit a sci fi book or a tv show.
Like the real world colonization of the New World. I'm not sure where you're going with this. The myths and fictions of historical colonization downplayed a lot of things as well too.
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"Having colonized space" is very vague. If you mean that the solar system will be completely filled with colonists, then your statement is very obvious because it would be hard to design a semi-realistic scenario where that happens in a century, even with crazy advances in technology. It will take time for people to travel into space, build colonies, be born, communities to form, etc. Colonizing the solar system is much bigger task than colonizing the American continent. The moon by itself has slightly less
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No, because if you publish a book in 2 versions, they have to be priced the same, or one market will cannabalize sales from others. MIT has decided that whatever they are charging is what the market will bear. Nothing wrong with that.
However, in the case of sci-fi, an author can lower his price to a couple bucks and still make as much or more money per copy sold as he would earn with traditional publishing. Some premium authors who are well known won't sell their books for less than the hardcover price.
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The real question is not why TRSF is the same price for the print version as for the electronic version (and what to do if you, as I do, want both - a book to put on the shelf and a kindle version to read) but why is Arc $7 for the electronic version and $30 for the print-on-demand hardcopy version. Does it really cost $23 to print something on paper?
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You apparently haven't read Vernor Vinge (Score:3)
Of course, you realize that NO ONE predicted the impact that the internet would have a scant 30 years ago.
True Names was published in 1981, which is a scant 31 years ago. Read it first of all to see that someone DID envision the impact of the global internet, and its resultant creation of cyberspace. But more importantly, read it because it is a brilliant example of what science fiction can be.
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In the next few years, there will be more space tourists visiting space than there have been professional astronauts in the past sixty years.
I, for one, look forward eagerly to a series of tragic accidents that end up killing several extremely wealthy, utterly pointless human beings.
"Houston we have a problem."
"Well fucking buy yourself a space tow truck then."
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On the one hand, traditional publishing has been dying.
Publishing is always dying. It's famous for how much money it doesn't make.
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The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality.
Which would be a serious problem indeed for the science fiction genre, had there been no new ideas in the field since the 1950s.
While I think that your post almost entirely misses the point of science fiction in that you're focusing on the technology rather than on the story, even on that level you're looking in the wrong place. Decades ago we had the dawn of the nuclear age, the space race, the Cold War--and the science fiction of that era reflected the associated hopes, fears, and gadgets.
When more
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Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead, it now looks like the world of the future is going to be far weirder and harder to understand than than we dreamed of.
Sounds like a good subject for an SF story:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100526022103/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1988/1/1988_1_34.shtml [archive.org]
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Several authors I know of would release a "beta version" of their stories as an ebook, make some money, and pay editors to help them make a cleaned up and improved version.
If there were a book about "The Top Ten Stupidest Ideas Of All Time" that would go straight in near the top. Literature is not the same as software.
This is an important development (Score:5, Interesting)
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Roads? (Score:2)
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Good news to me (Score:3)
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I agree with you there, although this should apply to the physics side of things, not practical barriers. Just because we don't know how to do something now, shouldn't stop a writer from assuming we might know how to do it in the future.
For instance, the human life span. It's totally possible that this might be extended considerably (all the way up to indefinitely). A 134-year trip (one way) to some far-away destination would no longer require "generation-ships" to do. The business-side of things (how such
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It's totally possible that this might be extended considerably (all the way up to indefinitely).
It's possible in the sense that the idea doesn't seem to break any of the currently formulated laws of physics (unlike faster than light travel), but that doesn't mean it's ever gong to happen.
"The future of science fiction" (Score:2)
A.k.a. Science Fiction Science Fiction
News? (Score:4, Funny)
I thought New Scientist already was science fiction.
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Please note that ARC is only available for iPad or Kindle...Thank you to TRSF, with ePub and Kindle formats.
Compatibility problems generally go away if you have Calibre and the appropriate DRM-stripping plugins...
But if you'd rather deal with an SF magazine that doesn't impose DRM in the first place, check out Interzone:
http://ttapress.com/interzone/ [ttapress.com]
You can get it in the usual formats from Smashwords or Fictionwise:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/132535 [smashwords.com]
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b129717/Interzone-Science-Fiction-and-Fantasy-Magazine-235/TTA-Press-Authors/?si=0 [fictionwise.com]
and there's a free sample issue:
http://www [smashwords.com]
Huh? (Score:3)
At least until the one based on a true story did will have camed out.
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Can't say it looks all too encouraging.
Doesn't sound that impressive a story to me at a literate, sci fi reader. A couple of publishers are entering a niche market in sci fi. Why should people care as much about this as a good troll story about homophobia or the FBI having to cut back substantially on its warrantless surveillance activities?
Omni magazine redux? (Score:1)
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Say what you will, I miss Omni, goofy pseudo-science and all. It was usually entertaining, as long as you didn't take it too seriously...
I just read it for the fiction.
OTOH, I *do* remember reading about GRID (later renamed AIDS) in OMNI well before I did anywhere else. Actually, I think that I read about it before it was named, even.
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THIS. I was just the right age (12? 14?) for Omni to resonate with me during its heyday.
Science Fiction often inspires Science (Score:2)
Dare to dream (Score:2)
What's the big deal here? Are they rebranding the Science Fiction as Science Fact?
Will there be cross-overs between the various publications to obfuscate science from fiction?
Or is it just a publisher recognizing that the influence of Science Fiction can help steer public interest in Science, offer ways of explaining recent discoveries in an easy and entertaining manner to the layman and have a hand in helping steer today's youth to careers in scientific related fields or at least to encourage them to be op
Looking for ideas? (Score:2)
Re:Looking for ideas? (Score:4, Insightful)
Star Trek's "Warp Drive" prompted the idea of the Alcubierre drive which is theoretically but not technologically possible. Of course flying was known to be theoretically possible but not technologically possible until the last century.
Not the same. Flying was known to be technologically possible because we see plenty of things which already fly. Birds, bats, etc have already the technology to fly. But even if they didn't exist, we could come up with models, such as the flying wing or hot air balloon that would strongly indicate that flying was technologically possible.
The Alcubierre drive is merely not obviously prohibited by our current theoretical understanding of physics. That's a vastly weaker claim.
Forgot the most important one (Score:2)
Good for authors, too. (Score:1)