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I like to read, and unfortunately the signal-to-noise ratio in science fiction and fantasy is poor, so it's hard to find good reads.

There is a yearly "the year's best science fiction" collection of stories and short novels (edited by Gardner Dozois), and there are a couple of decent journals (like Asimov's). If you buy these, you will read sample stories of good writers that also publish books. That way you will find enough good SF to read for the rest of your life.

I second Greg Egan. For a taste, here's a free short story.

2006: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/061206seedmoney.htm

Prison planet?

2010: http://www.infowars.com/google-and-cia-fund-political-precrime-technology/

Infowars???

Free award-winning SF stories/novellas - http://www.asimovs.com/

Ah! I got it!

Seriously, Alex Jones, founder of Infowars and Prison Planet, is known for "Advocacy of national sovereignty; New World Order theories; anti-world government; and various conspiracy theories". And no, I'm not Portuguese.

I know you were looking for technical magazines, but two of the most import science fiction magazines in the field, Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction are still being published on paper (though I think both are also available in electronic format as well).

You can also find the ones published by Asimov's at http://www.asimovs.com/2011_09/index.shtml in PDF form.

I just don't see any compelling reason to switch to a new codec when everything I own already uses MPEG4's H264. It makes as little sense to me as deciding to move from MP3 to Snogg Vorbis

"Snogg" Vorbis? Harumph... I love it when someone without wit tries to be witty. As to the reason to switch,

Licensing and patent issues!

Many organizations have claimed ownership of patents related to MP3 decoding or encoding. These claims have led to a number of legal threats and actions from a variety of sources, resulting in uncertainty about which patents must be licensed in order to create MP3 products without committing patent infringement in countries that allow software patents.

The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S.[51] The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available in December 6, 1991 as ISO CD 11172.[52][53] In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to June 8, 1995, submarine patents made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent free in the US by December 2012.[54]

Technicolor (formerly called Thomson Consumer Electronics) claims to control MP3 licensing of the Layer 3 patents in many countries, including the United States, Japan, Canada and EU countries.[55] Technicolor has been actively enforcing these patents.[56]

MP3 license revenues generated about €100 million for the Fraunhofer Society in 2005.[57]

That seems to me an excellent reason to switch from ANYTHING that group does, especially if you're publishing.

Oh and yes Firefox, Opera, et cetera support MPEG4 video, via the Flash support

Flash is a horrible, insecure mess. Better than Silverlight, but still bad. Both should be avoided whenever possible. OTOH,

WebM is a multimedia container format designed to provide a royalty-free, high-quality open video compression format for use with HTML5 video. The project's development is sponsored by Google.

A WebM file consists of VP8 video and Vorbis audio streams, in a container based on a profile of Matroska.[3][4][5] The project releases WebM related software under a BSD license and all users are granted a worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free patent license.

Look, if you're a Windows fan running Win 7 on your Sony computer, that's fine with me, but I want standards to be not only standard, but free and unencumbered. Your consumerist stance is antithetical to the nerd mindset. We build shit, invent shit, construct shit, come up with new ways to use shit. Proprietary "standards" are a great hindrance to true nerds.

ASIMOV'S Opinion Piece - Internet Giving Kids Higher IQ: http://www.asimovs.com/2011_01/onthenet.shtml

Asimov's been dead for almost twenty years. Why use his name for an opinion piece expressing someone else's opinion? I sincerely doubt Dr. Asimov would agree with it were he still alive. BTW, here's how to make that into a link:

<a href="http://www.asimovs.com/2011_01/onthenet.shtml">ASIMOV'S Opinion Piece - Internet Giving Kids Higher IQ:

(You don't need the closing tag </a> in a sig unless something not in the link follows.)

Is anyone writing SF like that these days? It seems to have stopped in the '70s or early '80s.

There are still tons of good "hard" science fiction writers out there working: Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan (to name a few). You'll still find plenty of hard science fiction in Asimov's, Analog, and Dozois's annual "Years Best Science Fiction" collection.

I recall a story in either Asimov's or Analog that posited this same idea. A single year extension and they discover ice on the lunar poles, then differences back home (Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson as presidents) and a culmination with Walter Cronkite doing a live remote on the lunar surface to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first landing. One of the underlying themes was people in that alternate future wishing history had taken a slightly different course and even more had been accomplished. Anyone else remember this story?

the elephants on Neptune

There are a few science fiction magazines out there, such as Asimov's, that are worth subscribing. http://www.asimovs.com/

Admittedly, the short stories are a mix. Some great, some good, some decent, and some mind-raping-awful ones. But its a great way to sample new/unknown to you talent. If you find a serial in the magazine you really enjoy, the author tends to also write books... And bingo - instant reading list.

And then, there is your local science fiction and fantasy bookstore (A dying breed, unfortunately. Almost all of the independent specialized bookstores I once went to are gone.). Now I know you are short on time, but if you live near one, and the bookseller is the type that thrives on customer interaction, you are all set. After buying there for a year, you will never really need to spend more then a minute in the store... My local bookseller pulls a pile in advance these days for me when I go in (about once every three months), and it has been tailored to my reading taste. With something new thrown in every now and then that I might enjoy. In, out, and when I pop in in three months we discuss which ones I liked the best and the refining process continues. And if you're an excellent customer on good terms with the owner, then there is a chance you may be blessed with free "Advanced reader's editions -Do not sell"... Which are much like the stories in Asimov's, now I think of it...

It's by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, and you can find the beginning here. (Thanks Google!)

We just need some scientist in San Diego to upload the brains of these new crustaceans into computers so they can hack into the Moscow Windows NT user group, then get in touch with Manfred. He can find them jobs in deep space.

If you have no idea what I mean, try:

http://www.asimovs.com/Nebulas03/Lobsters.shtml

Regards.

I've been looking for a good magazine sci-fi fix ever since. This could be just what I've been looking for since I was a teenager, if they do it right.

Was there something wrong with Asimov's or Analog or Fantasy and Science Fiction? They've been publishing the whole time and helping to keep the short sf market alive.

Granted that of these only Analog publishes science fact articles as well, but if you subscribe to those three and add Scientific American you're covered.

But its only chapter 1 of Accelerando the book. And in each subsequent chapter he's distilling things down, speeding things up. By the 2nd half of the book he's handing you pan galactic gargle blasters as his chapters. Never mind a brick wrapped in lemon: his book is a porcupine wrapped in velvet. Once you're done quite a lot is going to stick with you.

You get jealous of the lobsters and start worrying heavily for yourself. You remember that feeling of being a top-of-the-techworld Silicon Valley type going to Japan for the first time. Jetlagged in Akihabara, it hits you that you're a bit behind the curve: your portables are Model-T's and Japanese teenagers are choosing their Ferraris. And Charlie is telling you that the feeling is only going to get worse. And permanent. And your kids and grandkids'll have to deal with it too. Better hope your grandniece's "My First Pharma Lab" can make a nice TetraValium, you'll need it.

The technologists can tell you why the Singularity is Near- why today's technologies are leading towards it. But it takes a book like Stross's to remind you that we're not just contemplating a technologic switch equivalent to tool-making and upright walking, or even lungfish thinking about a permanent stay: we're the anaerobes wondering what happens if the atmosphere switches to oxygen, but we keep on producing oxygen by-products anyways.

...a few hours of slackjawed cartoon watching and the worry mostly fades away, but you never get all of the quills out. Or at any rate, its a very good read-- better be on the Nebula and Hugo shortlists. It isn't a perfect book, writing-wise, but he's got the Sensawunda: the rest comes with practice. That a great author is going to get better is cause for happiness.

Just in case you were wanting to read the first chapter of "Accelerando" without downloading the entire novel, I'd like to point out that Lobsters (as mentioned in the preceding post) is effectively the first draft of Chapter One.

I probably won't dig up a hard copy of the short story Lobsters, and I'll probably buy Iron Sunrise on dead trees before getting around to reading Accelerando online or in print. But Stross is a good writer, and book formats work better for longer works than e-books usually do, though back when I was commuting by train there were a number of books I read on my palm-pilot.

Lobsters is a really really strange short story, and you should go read it, ideally online while sitting in your favorite pub. Singularity Skyis a novel exploring a post-Singularity world, nanotech, clashes of cultures, reaction to post-scarcity economics and human (and post-human) creativity. It's deep stuff, and simultaneously a fun read, and he's an interesting guy to talk to if you're ever on the correct coast of the correct continent or island.

Perhaps they are going to try to reincarnate as Asmov's Science Fiction.

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but Analog and Asimov magazines feature short stories, but once or twice per year will serialize a novel. If you prefer mysteries, I imagine similar offerings are available for Ellery Queen and Hitchcock magazines.

There is a Fantasy magazine in the same format, but the name escapes me.

Allen Steele wrote about that...

The Days Between

cheers

front

First, as I recently wrote, SF SF isn't about prediction. It rarely claims to be, and the prediction-style books are rarely the gems. Its about how we might react to new circumstances (ordinary life which just happens to be set in the 2060's), how trends- if amplified- could affect us, and most importantly, its about Sensawunda. Atwood wasn't predicting Fundies taking over the US, but she captured the feel of the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. We don't have a cyberpunk life, but SF has given us premonitions of what DRM, the Induce act, and Axciom can do once they get powerful enough.

Much of the best new SF is near term work. Charlie Stross reads like the next 30 years of slashdot stories are on his hard-drive. Kress, Egan, Marusek, Stephenson... they've got plenty of stories set 10-40 years away, not hundreds or thousands.

And then focusing on Sawyer-- they've bought into his self-promotion. He's ok, but he isn't the only Canadian SF writer (as also recently written there are several Canadian writers who could take him on even with the "e" key missing on their keyboards). And someone like Stross has more throwaway / background predictions in his near future stories (for example in the 2010's setting for Lobsters) than Sawyer can make in an actual "predictions" article (see 2nd link above).

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0406/legionsintime.s html/

But anyways, as I just wrote in the Singularity vs SF thread, SF is almost never about prediction. Its about showing how people will react to major changes in science or society. Sure, there've been some lucky hits, and there are SF writers who enjoy extended infodumps, but that's not the point / not the goal.

With SF you're trying to capture the feel of ordinary life under new (to us) circumstances. The best SF ( short stories or novels, or award nominees) often read like ordinary books, just from very far away. As an example, the Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting the future of the US. But look how well it captured the look and feel of a country taken over by religious fundies (i.e. the Taliban).

For a much better take on what life might be like in the 2010's, read Stross's award nominated first story in his Accelerando set. At peak density one of his paragraphs contain more predictions than all of Sawyer's article, yet Lobsters also includes sensawunda. (sensawunda: hard to define, but its analogous to Chesterton's quote (my paraphrase): we shouldn't treat 'we can go to the moon' as being just as ordinary and boring as a telephone call. We should realize that being able to call anyone, anywhere in the world is as amazing as being able to go to the moon.)

Hard to capture a single quote, but for example (and this crowd):

[protagonist arrives at a bar for his meeting] "Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard's that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

"...The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

"Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he's about to be slashdotted..."

"...Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"

Locus , the professional news and reviews monthly of written science fiction.

Asimov's Science Fiction , the science fiction's premiere fiction magazine (also where I've sold most of my stories). F&SF would be the runner-up.

I used to read The Weekly Standard as well as National Review, but let my subscription lapse when I found myself falling rurther and further behind. Reason is also worth looking at.

For short story:

Just Like The Ones We Used To Know

Some of us already know how that will play out.

My one suggestion to my family is a magazine subscription. Preferably Asimov's or Analog. Good stories, and updates monthly, and it doesn't cost much more than a book.

If you really want memory cards, power cells, and a backlight, you can get a subscription to Baen Books. Four books a month, and previews of their upcoming catalog. No DRM either: just open formats.

My family has given up on giving me books: I've usually already read anything they find...

The traditional Sci-Fi of rocket ships, blaster guns, and aliens may be on decline

Actually, all that stuff is *coming back* (if often with a postmodern, ironic slant): the most recent trend in SF (that I'm aware of) is the "new baroque space opera".

The original poster is *seriously* (as in, 30 years) behind the curve on SF - the move away from technology was in the 70s (the "New Wave"), then we had the 80s stylized technology ("Cyberpunk"), then the 90s with a lot of *great* work on the impact of technology on society, and now we're retooling the 50s-style space opera. (Which may indeed have a lot to do with the current doldrums in human space flight.)

The recent Tolkien-triggered interest in fantasy had zero impact on SF - the two fields are well enough decoupled from each other these days. SF is bigger, healthier, and better than ever before, if you know where to look. Some rough guidelines:

1) any SF made in Hollywood is utter crap. For Hollywood, SF = juvenile adventure stories. Ignore movies, ignore TV, ignore games, ignore movie, TV, and gaming tie-ins.

2) the primary form of SF is the *short story*, not the novel. Short stories are the ongoing dialogue of ideas between SF authors; novels are what they fluff their short stories up into when they need money to pay the bills. Read the short stories!

3) to read the current short stories, you subscribe to SF *magazines*, such as Interzone, Asimovs' SF, Analog, Fantasy & SF, to name but the largest.

4) to catch up on the last two decades, buy past editions of "The Year's Best SF" edited by Gardner Dozois. You'll have the best short stories and novellas of a year at an unbeatable price. Gardner knows the field like no one else.

I have yet to make friends with the "new baroque" style - my favorite stuff is the work speculating on the implications of the latest, cutting-edge science, and its impact on society. If you're not scared of plots pivoting on the finer points of quantum mechanics, biotechnology, and theory of computation, Greg Egan is the man here. His short stories are collected in "Axiomatic" and "Luminous".

I could go on now about all the wonderful *old* SF that people who never dug deeper than Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke are missing out on (ever heard of Tiptree?) but that's left as an exercise to the reader :-)

- nic

Disclaimer: I don't have time to read the mags, and am still working on last year's Dozois - so I'm about two years behind the curve myself.

Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...

Authors

• Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
• Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
• Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
• Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.

• Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
• Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
• Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
• Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.

I might like technical consistence & cluefulness more than most people. The following list of writers reflects that.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing just released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory and his work have been mentioned here a time or five before. He just co-wrote Jury Service with Charlie Stross, another loopy fun writer. Stross' Lobsters is online; Stross' interview and appearance on Slashdot made me seek out more. Stross' list of published fiction includes a dozen online versions of stories. Both Doctorow & Stross are entertainingly loopy, and technically consistent & clueful.

John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Shockwave Rider" are good dystopian lit.

Bruce Sterling is still around; he just wrote "Tomorrow Now," a non-fiction futurist book. Zeitgeist, Distraction, and Holy Fire were all enjoyable and insightful.

Vernor Vinge coined the term "singularity." "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" have a joining character pre- and post-Singularity, and both won Hugos. He just released some short stories, but I haven't read it yet.

Matt Ruff wrote the science fiction "Sewer Gas & Electric" and fantasy "Fool on the Hill." The first is funny and fast-paced.

I've enjoyed K. W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker, Roger Williams (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) a bit...

Technical accuracy isn't his forte, but Jim Monroe, a former managing editor of Adbusters, wrote Angry Young Spaceman and Living in Silico. I downloaded AYS ages ago, but bought a copy during his tour so I can loan it to friends. Oh, and checking now, he's put his 1999 book Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask up.

I am also a big sci-fi buff, end up reading about one book/week. My personal favorite is Nancy Kress, she has a serious on geneticlly altered children and how they cope. VERY good stuff.
Also if you like sci-fi w/ a good sense of humor, try Steven Brust. He has a "Taltos" series thats kinda fantasy, but still damn good. Brust also has some more hard core sci-fi titles, but i'll let you find those on your own ;)

Robert Asprin is pretty good, but again, hes more of a fantasy tilt. The best place to find new good sci-fi IMHO would be the Issac Asimovs monthly magazine. They have short stories, novellas, and novellettes. Thats where i've found most of the outstanding authors i've come across.
Happy hunting!

After hearing about Bruce Sterling I found a copy of Islands in the Net in a used bookstore... I've never been able to bring myself to read another one by him. Anyone with thoughts about his other books?

As for the novels, personally I think Heavy Weather and Zeitgeist are brilliant, but I've had trouble convincing other people of this. Schismatrix, which is rather older, is also quite good -- something like what might have happened if Heinlein's juveniles had been written by William S. Burroughs.

If your wondering whether you'd like Sterling, probably the easiest thing to do is check out some of his nonfiction online.

(Oh, and if you like Sterling, or even Stephenson, you should also probably check out Charles Stross. You might call his stuff post-Slashdot cyberpunk.)

Sheffield is much better known, I think, in the short SF field. Check out Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine if you're interested in trying short SciFi. Short Sci Fi is a great way to discover excellent authors and then read some of their longer novels.

Anyway, there are a lot more great SF authors out there than Bester and Egan - Dan Simmons, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick, Allen Steele (though I suggest sticking to Steele's short stories, his novels are just political dogma disguised as SF), George R. R. Martin (Martin was well known in the Sci Fi field long before his current fantasy popularity) - plus the obvious Big Names - Orson Scott Card, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, I could go on forever. If only there were more time to read...

On other occasions, though, the squids have taken their time about withdrawing from the scene. There is no reason, after all, why they should show fear of visiting submersibles from the upper world, since such visits have been very few and far between indeed during the thousands or perhaps millions of years that these squids have occupied the lower depths. They have been known to hang around in the presence of the submersibles, gently waving their wing-like fins to hold their positions. One of them, in fact, prodded a submersible with its tentacle, getting its suckers stuck to it and experiencing some difficulty letting go.

Just to stay on-topic to some extent, here's his story in Asimov's . Definitely worth a read! Has a sense of humor that reminds me of Stephenson.

Just to stay on-topic to some extent, here's his story in Asimov's . Definitely worth a read! Has a sense of humor that reminds me of Stephenson.

The Hugo award winner for novelette, "Millennium Babies" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, can be read online in its entirity at the Asimov's Science Fiction website.

TC

The Hugo award winner for novelette, "Millennium Babies" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, can be read online in its entirity at the Asimov's Science Fiction website.

TC

...for her novella, The Winds of Marble Arch (online at Asimov's).

If the count is up to date, this makes her fourteenth major award -- six Nebulas, and eight Hugos. That's more than any other sf author, even some of the big names ... and she's still in the prime of her career.

Frankly, I had a hard time with The Doomsday Book, for various reasons including the fact that major characters playing with dangerous technology acted like idiots, but in the end it was very worthwhile. I'm just surprised it took me so many years to discover her. (Easy to do when you quit reading new sf, like I did.)

But I've now read more of her "Dunsworthy time machine" stories, the collection Fire Watch, which is top-notch, and I've jsut begun last year's Hugo winner for novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Not to be missed. If you've been off the SF beat for a while, pick up some Willis, you'll be glad you did.
----

I don't know if they're still published, but much of my early sf reading was done from the excellent Hugo and Nebula award collections, which included everything _but_ the award-winning novels. They can be found collecting dust on the shelves of many libraries, and would give an sf newbie a good idea of which authors to pursue.

A subscription to the sf magazines Analog or Asimov's would be another great source for short stories.

The great writers of science fiction exist because of the magazines. Few writers this century sprang up ex novelo; they developed their talents and reputations with shorter stories published first. And most would continue to write short stories after their novels are published- it keeps the mind sharp, because a good short story is the most difficult type of writing. The stories also create a fan base and a track record that both contribute to a publisher's willingness to accept a novel.

Recent anthologies like "The Year's Best Science Fiction" contain stories that rival anything from the golden age of SF in intensity, cutting-edgeness, and sheer old-fashioned numinous sense-of-wonderness. Notice where the stories came from: Asimov's (probably the largest single source), SF Age, Analog, SF&F...all good magazines. And look at awards lists of recent Hugo and Nebula winners/nominees. Authors first show up in the lists with shorter story nominations, and then the novels appear.

Now for a re-read of Weapon Shop...