Neuromancer to be butchered for cinema?

God, how I hope not. "Neuromancer" left such dazzling images in my mind's eye, due in no small part to Gibson's smooth, lethal prose. I'm not sure I could countenance a screen version; more likely I'd wind up in a megaplex parking lot wielding a placard, a megaphone and a box of "Neuromancer" hardcopies in a vainglorious attempt to dissuade movie-goers.

Cyberpunks take note: Ballardian's got itself a YouTube channel!

Are science fiction cars your bag? Do you drool over the "spinners" from "Blade Runner"? This post is for you.

Also: Diligently pursuing the sexbot meme.

I got it, baby. The four-disc "Blade Runner" final cut. Christmas miracles do come true!

The "Blade Runner" final cut boxed set is out. You know you want it.

(How much for just the briefcase? If that's not a cyberpunk chick-magnet, I don't know what is.)

I'm reading, among other things, "Anxious Pleasures" by Lance Olsen, an endearing and gorgeously written retelling of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Olsen maintains a great website; I was greatly relieved to discover that, in addition to writing "literary" fiction, he's into cyberpunk.

Postsingular Free Online Now!

Rudy Rucker's giving away free downloads of his latest novel, "Postsingular." And I'm down with it.

Oh, if this isn't cool!



It's also more or less what I imagined when I wrote the love scene for "One Hundred Years" (available in its entirety here):

Dimly, I watched her unzip a flask of image-conductive lotion and spread it on my hands and wrists. We watched our thoughts coalesce, warped to the contours of bone and muscle: a pornography of mentation.

If we concentrated on not concentrating, the images would almost begin to make sense. We held our breath at the sight of the sun flickering in a chrome sky. Fuzzy, crooked shapes that might have been chromosomes flexed and burned endlessly at its core.

[. . .]

We listened to my collection of late 20th century music, undressing each other to the leaden beat of vintage trip-hop. The glowing fabric of Sterope's sarong gilded her waist and breasts in bloodred light. The screens on her bare arms flashed erotic poems in forgotten languages. Hieroglyphics morphed into Sanskrit; runes and mandalas blossomed like foliage in an Ernst painting.

(Video found at Ectoplasmosis.)

I just started "Sun of Suns" by Karl Schroeder. What a fascinating far-future milieu: it's conceptually daring and vertiginous, so I'm letting its "steampunk" trappings slide.

Cyberpunk Rudy Rucker is in Kyoto and, as usual, taking great pictures.

If you live in the San Fransisco area, there's no excuse for missing this. None.

Q&A;: Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined

Teemu Arina interviews Bruce Sterling:



I've been a fan of Sterling since I discovered him (belatedly) in the early 1990s. The man's got a fierce grip on what's coming down the pike and an uncanny intellectual hazard-avoidance system. Oh, and he writes science fiction.

Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future

This year Unit 15 will continue its research into 'synthetic space', that is spaces that exist as hybrids of the 'actual' and the 'virtual', by examining speculative, narrative architectures, based on the work of the writer J G Ballard. J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

(Via Ballardian.)

That's right: an architecture course inspired by and based upon the works of J.G. Ballard. This is something of an intellectual wet dream come true.

Exclusive! Bruce Sterling shamelessly outs himself as a Mundane SF sympathizer!

Seminal cyberpunk author John Shirley, no stranger to the music business, has launched a MySpace page featuring original material. If you're nice to him, maybe he'll let you be his friend.

Is Science Fiction Still a Distinct Genre?

Some people are using the term Sprawl Fiction to encompass the incredible diversity of forms and concepts that classical scifi has spread out into. You could think of traditional Science Fiction as the built-up, established, older city core, and Sprawl as the rapidly expanding literary suburbs young writers are fleeing to in search of more elbow room to test out new ideas. So people who assert that "Science Fiction is dead" are looking at where scifi used to be and missing the bigger picture completely.

How, for example, to categorize a novel as transgressive as "Pattern Recognition" or as relentlessly surreal as "Perdido Street Station"? What will genre historians make out of a book like Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom," John Shirley's "Crawlers" or Jack Womack's "Random Acts of Senseless Violence"?

Online but off the grid - Japan's internet café homeless

In an example of interstitial existence that sounds like it leaped straight from the pages of a William Gibson novel, the Japanese government has announced that there are over 5,000 "internet café refugees" eking out a living at the bottom of the social strata, taking what temporary work they can and dossing down in 24-hour internet cafés in the absence of a home of their own.

This reminds me of a short-story I abandoned several years ago:

The thick medicinal waters of the creek below sloshed greenly onto the walkway, where vagrants retreated into the worlds behind their gaudy single-use only VR goggles or trawled cheap plastic mediaslates for even cheaper pornography. Black ivy clung to the surrounding walls in dense sheets that rustled in the warm, gusty air. Graham bit into the straw jutting from his coffee, eyes diverted. The rapidly scrolling slates glowed like pale fire; he thought he saw an iteration of breasts and genitals, rendered in resolution so precise it seemed he looked through distant windows.

Later . . .

The lamps, blood-red and glowing at half-capacity, dangled listlessly, swaying like carcasses in a meat-locker. Back on the street, bulbous, steam-puffing cars zipped by, windows mirrored against the glare of storefronts and the foundering neon of once-chic restaurants. Homeless people, many of them marred by cruel deformities, lined the defunct sidewalk, summoning vicarious charms from slates and projectors. A tiny naked woman with copious piercings writhed in mid-air, extremities flickering.

Les Xénobiophiles is a blog after my own heart. The only problem is that it's in French, a language that, to my considerable chagrin, I can't speak worth a damn.

Study predicts more severe U.S. storms

As the world warms, the United States will face more severe thunderstorms with deadly lightning, damaging hail and the potential for tornadoes, a trailblazing study by NASA scientists suggests.

While other research has warned of broad weather changes on a large scale, like more extreme hurricanes and droughts, the new study predicts even smaller events like thunderstorms will be more dangerous because of global warming.

Be prepared -- read Bruce Sterling's disquietingly prescient "Heavy Weather."





More Sterling here.