November 12th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
Forums essentially descend directly from the “ancient” bulletin board systems, in many ways the original social networking applications (other than email). But most of them don’t take full advantage of everything we’ve learned or implement common features from other social applications.
I spend a lot of time on a specific community that primarily uses a forum (SMF in this particular case) for almost everything. Many communities use these applications as sot of a “poor man’s CMS”, particularly as the community organizers and leaders don’t necessarily have a great deal of expertise in web applications or system administration. While a number of applications (bbpress, Google Groups, etc.) do have support for some of these mechanisms, I’d particularly appreciate a third-party indexer that builds upon existing sites, maybe through scraping.
The mechanisms I want to see
- Share out comments I’ve written into my lifestream. Some of my posts on forums I frequent really don’t have a lot of value, but some of them took a lot of thought and concern.
- Follow comments from my friends. Other indivdual posters frequently have intelligent, thoughtful posts in threads or sub-forums I don’t normally read, and I’d like to subscribe to their posts.
- Find other forums where my friends participate; after all, if we spend a lot of time interacting with them in one context, we likely share interests and potential friends.
- Search across forums similar to how Google enables us to search across blogs. Currently, forum posts do get indexed but a special “forum search” would help lead to #2 and #3 (particularly if it had an API).
November 12th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
The stuff I already have at home and still pending.
Coyote by Allen Steele
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
November 11th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
A friend at work sent me this list of The 8 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Which Most Desperately Need Movies (sic).
I’ve never read several of these, principally those that fall into the “fantasy” side more than the “sci-fi” side.
But The Man in the High Castle seems like a natural for Hollywood, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened yet. Snow Crash would likewise come out well.
The Foundation series could possibly do it, though of Asimov’s works the R. Daneel Olivaw mysteries probably lend themselves best to screenplays. We won’t mention the travesty of I, Robot a few years back.
More recently, Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series seems like it could really work as a screenplay, and the author has expressed interest in that happening someday.
I’m wondering what presents more challenges to screenwriters and directors: far-future (like Foundation) or near-future (like Snow Crash)?
July 8th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
Overall, this issue largely revolved around belief and religion (though not entirely). Sadly, much of the writing that focused on that theme are not the best stories in this issue. There are some more thoughts over at the always-interesting SF Gospel. Below the fold are my thoughts about the fiction in this issue.
Continue reading ‘Analog July-August 2008′
June 26th, 2008 by Kyle Maxwell
I think the July issue of Asimov’s might still be available on newsstands. Here are my thoughts on the contents. This was a fairly average issue of Asimov’s, which is to say that it was very good.
The Philosopher’s Stone - Brian Stableford - A steampunk story touching on Sir Francis Drake, etherships, alternate history… This novella just is not my style, but it seems to be a fairly decent example of the genre. The writer tells an interesting story and sketches out a protagonist that seems “real” (if not memorable). Several of the supporting characters lacked depth; bringing them out a little more might have helped me to overcome my apathy towards the genre.
Lester Young and the Jupiter Moons’ Blues - Gord Sellar - This is an absolutely wonderful mix of 1940s jazz & black culture, plus sort of an alien invasion; the voice of the character is dead-on. Why isn’t more SF written like this? That is to say, with characters clearly of color and willing to explore issues of race. This story will stick with me for a long, long time.
Vinegar Peace, or, The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage - Michael Bishop - An emotional piece about parents surviving their children by an author who knows first-hand. The flow is almost “stream of consciousness” but stays grounded enough not to become distracting.
The Woman Under the World - Steven Utley - A fine example of very short fiction exploring one idea, in the vein of the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
Cascading Violet Hair - R. Neube - I love SF noir, and this story delivers. Set on a space station with resource shortages, dealing with the results of overly authoritarian governments, the story contains several nuggets worth considering in our own world.
26 Monkeys, also the Abyss - Kij Johnson - Wow, this was almost magical realism. It drug on a little bit here and there, and it’s not the sort of hard science fiction I personally prefer, but the author manages to make one of the monkeys outshine the main character. Not by accident, I’ll note.
Light Across an Impossible Lake - Mark Rich - I’m still pondering the explication of this tantalizing poem. It’s like I can almost figure out what he’s really describing, but the language is vaguely evocative of enough different things that it’s not simply a poetic description of some astronomical phenomenon, I think. And that makes it excellent verse.
December 8th, 2007 by Kyle Maxwell
I recently re-read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and then its sequel Spook Country. The first is an outstanding foray into modern life on the Net, complete with lots of discussion of 21st-century marketing, 9/11, and Internet forums. The protagonist, Cayce, is a fairly sympathetic character but most of the rest have layers of complexity that hint at all sorts of other doings that would be interesting. Although at this point it’s a few years old, it’s still well worth reading.
The sequel takes some of those other doings and examines them. Unfortunately, it follows a “zipper story” structure of separately following three different people (or groups of people) until they get to the big finale where they all come together in an odd way. It was quite disappointing, as the Clancy-like structure made it difficult to really get into the heads of any of the characters, and the closest thing the novel has to a protagonist never really engages the audience. The climax of the book is the most in-depth and developed pun I’ve ever run across in my life, but to say more would be to ruin the best thing about it.
Neither book is classically SF, as it’s focused more on examining technological changes already occurring. Gibson seems to be pointing out that we’re already in the “future” about which so much has been written, and while there’s a lot of very up-to-date culture and tech there, all of it is examined with the eye of someone who wants to perceive it in context, rather than “gee-whiz-cool!”
Recommended.
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