Big Jelly

This weekend’s reading was a selection of classic science fiction texts, and the first in the convergence section of my current course. They include Borges’ “The Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941), Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) and ”The Star” (1955), and Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981). A common theme throughout these four [...]

Last night, I watched the first episode of Discovery’s new show The Colony. It’s a new reality show that takes place in a simulated post-apocalyptic world caused by a global pandemic of super flu. Think The Real World meets Survivor. (I actually began thinking that this would have been a good venue for the new [...]

I saw Chris Nolan’s Inception last night, and while it had some weak points, I enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Steven Soderbergh’s interpretation of Solaris. Both films deal with the protagonist’s regret and the projection of that regret into their lost loves. While the planet of Solaris is the catalyst for Kelvin’s [...]

I recently returned from a multi-day journey on which I was able to listen to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End on audio. Science fiction audio and travel just seem to go together for me. If I don’t have audio books, I like Escape Pod. However, I made sure these two classics [...]

After a couple of years and several recommendations, I finally read Dan Simmon’s Ilium. I’ve been a Homer aficionado for most of my life (thanks, Mrs. Farmer!), and an “expert” ever since I took my first class in graduate school on epic poetry. I’ve written quite a bit on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey — not [...]

Since I’m teaching them this semester, I recently reviewed Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About,” and it seems to me as if these articles, 1950 and 1954 respectively, represent the beginning of a paradigm shift not only in the way we think about technology, but in [...]

At the conclusion of the selection from Theater of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal writes that the main goal of the theater should be the “liberation of the spectator, on whom the theater has imposed finished visions of the world” (Boal 352). His conclusion is that the spectator becomes a voiceless victim of bourgeois drama, unable to [...]

I’m currently writing a story that could be classified as cyberpunk space opera, along the lines of Charles Stross‘ Accelerando. I feel like I have to know something about physics, astronomy, and the anatomy of the galaxy. I mean: it is a space adventure, first and foremost, so I should know something factual about the [...]

Having thought about Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck for a couple of weeks now and trying to position it within the context of my current reading in new media, I’m left with the word liminal to describe not how it integrates into the discussion at large, but how I conceive of the larger conversation in general. In [...]

With the imminent release of the iPad on April 5, it and its older cousins the iPhone and iPod Touch are getting increasing attention by the tech pundits. While most of what I read are from pro-Apple sites — and are therefore biased, some of what I read is from pro-not-Apple sites — and are [...]