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from BLIT - http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/...

Not really the same. The post was literally "you deserve a seizure".

It is interesting that infohazards will likely be handled legally about as they should be.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/...

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/...
A Colder War

"... The metal pier is dry and cold, the temperature hovering close to zero degrees Fahrenheit. It's oppressively dark in the cavern under the ice, and Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of insulation, shifts from foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to keep his ears clear and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the artificial bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans to exist here, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they'll all spend more than a day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the surface.
There is no sound from the waters lapping just below the edge of the pier. The floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going -- the water in the sub-surface Antarctic lake is incredibly clear -- but are swallowed up rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky depths.... ... They're waiting for the men in the midget sub drilling quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned tomb...."

It's a test site for project Koschei

I have EXACTLY the thing for you!

A Colder War
a novelette by Charles Stross

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/...

See also: "A Colder War"

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/...

Except the fictional target is already imaginary, so it's either rotated into real matter or antimatter depending on the rotation phase.

> What do you expect ....?

"... They're afloat in a bubble of pressurized air wedged against the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.
They're waiting for a rendezvous...."

A Colder War
a novelette by Charles Stross
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

They'll find plenty of life in Vostok! Bwah-hahahahahahaha!

Asher is my favorite guilty pleasure. I would argue that he is on the hard end of the spectrum because it really is about the tech and aliens and AI ruled Polity and so on. These things are all central to the action rather than being backdrops or flavoring, and the space opera generally has some philosophical undercurrents.

Neal Asher writes a huge range of great monsters, action scenes with excellent pacing, firefights on seriously ridiculous scales, parasites with weird life-cycles, strange aliens and ecologies, and is just unreasonably fun to read. If he has a fault, it's underdeveloped villains with questionable motivations, but I'm happy to overlook them and get on with the good stuff.

Try Adaptogenic for an introductory Asher fix: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/adaptogenic.htm

the Oliver North/Guns for Hostages scandal, seen from the viewpoint of a CIA bureaucrat, in a universe in which the entire Cthulhu Mythos is real. (Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

While it scores virtually infinite cartoon-supervillain points(seriously, a massive, ever-expanding labarynthine nuclear-powered ice fortress?), I have to imagine that the cost/benefit got a lot less exciting once the more prosaic 'lots of nuclear submarines sneaking around, also we can use them to attack ships, in a pinch,' strategy became viable.

Incidentally, for anybody who likes our dread overlord Cthulhu, and wishes to be eaten first, this sounds like something ripped straight from A Colder War...

Seems to me like even with the advent of missile subs those tunnels could still have served as a hideout for World Leaders (tm) from our side of the political spectrum if the worst had happened...

Just to show off what a pedant nitpicking jerk I can be, I'd like to comment that using a missile sub to attack other ships is like the mother of all no-no's of missile sub handling; you want those hugely valuable babies to stay as hidden as possible, no matter what may come.

While it scores virtually infinite cartoon-supervillain points(seriously, a massive, ever-expanding labarynthine nuclear-powered ice fortress?), I have to imagine that the cost/benefit got a lot less exciting once the more prosaic 'lots of nuclear submarines sneaking around, also we can use them to attack ships, in a pinch,' strategy became viable.

Incidentally, for anybody who likes our dread overlord Cthulhu, and wishes to be eaten first, this sounds like something ripped straight from A Colder War...

So when will the CIA start smuggling Heroin through it?

You can try to read a book. A real book. A fiction book.

Holy crap! I have never in my life done that before! I had no idea such a thing was even possible!

(Or, just maybe I load them onto my phone. And save the dead-tree stuff for bedside at home.)

Don't click his link. It's the Goatse.cx image.

Also known as the poor man's basilisk.

When I read it, the book was Michael Swanwick's excellent 'Vacuum Flowers':

http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/02/earthless.html

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/vacuum.htm

"What you have to understand is the extreme speed with which the technology blossomed," Bors said. "When Earth first became conscious, it used all its resources to spread the technology as efficiently as possible. The first transceiver was implanted in March, let's say, and all Earth was integrated by Christmas. The first clear notion anybody off-planet had of what had actually happened was when the warcraft were launched."

This was written in 1987, 6 years before Vinge's essay on the Singularity, which references it. And here, before anyone had heard of the Cylon Hybrids or even the Borg, is Swanwick's sample of a 'Comprise' brain at work:

"Rotate grating six raise two and rotate again reroute quote the Comprise agree in principle but with reservations unquote raise the vial of eagle's blood reroute using Allen wrench adjust the potentiometer to the red mark reroute ship to Sanfrisco marked green code green reroute injecting kerosene between vascular stations seventeen and twelve reroute bedding excavation-"

There's a lot of subtle references that approach things like ethics and morality in that movie while still being interesting and funny on a technical level.

Such as... acoustic *cough* couplers *cough*?
Though in stark contrast to any director (apparently all filming for a perceived tech-illiterate audience) at least ever since Colossus, no self-respecting sighted hacker would have needed, used or wanted a voice synthesizer.

Rumour (that spelling for a reason you'll see) has it that Commodore's sales took a hit in Europe that Christmas season as Wargames and/or rather its media reception got parents concerned of putting the tools (with 1541 drives, though not from the movie) for summoning Soviet-response armageddon under their kids' trees.

At any rate it wasn't until Gen'82 so much rather than Gen'62 that the geeks would really get the girls (and better yet, even geek girls worth any wait)... ;-)

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

A Colder War

They might be proof of A god. One of many, in a rather unpleasant pantheon. Check to see if they have five-fold symmetry and iris-mouths.

Try The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter for a newer take on that idea.

Just be thankful you're not in this timeline:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Have a look at "A Colder War", which is in both Toast and Wireless (both excellent collections, even with this story appearing in both). You can also read in online at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Charles Strosss "A Colder War" short story has enough material to drive several seasons of Ctulhu-esque cold war goodness. If you havent read it, do. Does it get any better ? Entities from the abyss, cold war politics and lots of interesting historical characters.

I'd call that a feature, not a bug!

I believe pilot Wolf of the Huis Clos would heartily agree with you.

Take the time to read the short story called Yeyuka by noted Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan. It plays out the consequences on society of people with "enough money" being able to have the health monitored 24/7 by way of a ring they wear on their finger. You can find the story here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/yeyuka.htm

Oh, and while we're on the subject, Cthulhu goes pretty well with Cold War paranoia, as well: observe.

Halting State was a terrific little crime novel with Really Cool stuff in it. But all the Cool Kids are reading The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. A hacker is recruited by British Military-Occult Intelligence after his new fractal rendering program almost summons Nyarlathotep.

Here's A Colder War which recasts the Cold War era with weaponized Eldritch Horrors and such. It's sort of a prototype for the Atrocity Archive series.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."


And while we're on the subject.

And with that, I give you "Approaching Perimelasma" by Geoffrey A. Landis: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/perimelasma.htm

Yeah, somebody already came up with a modest proposal

The other civilizations played with artifacts of the Great Old Ones, who ate their brains.

(c.f. "A Colder War")

"Wonder how he protects from muscle strain. Does the suit go rigid briefly on impact like the ski team suits?"

Unlike the suits in the Forever War, this one doesn't come with powered joints, function in a vacuum or survive being attacked with laserbeams by space aliens. Even if the suit survives, the underlying tissue would be totally desiccated from the shockwave.

Actually, the parties to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 have sent repeated followup expeditions, but the crawling chaos got them all. And the Russians are deploying shoggoths in attack mode in the Khyber pass... sucks to be in that universe, I gather. (The robot to be slurped is "A Colder War" by Charles Stross. Highly recommended.)

The nickname of the device is a bit off though. It's a paving machine for the Moon. Why not call it something more appropriate?

When they started making music straight from the Azciak Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Art -- as if the process was anything new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research. The Azciak Probes were already revealing people's tastes in breakfast cereals, politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover precisely what music they'd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture it -- all in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.

Read the whole story, at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/worth.htm

If you're interested, Greg Egan's site: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/

[A] new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth - and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants . . . Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

Readers of Slashdot who also enjoy Lovecraftiana should check out Charles Stross who has written a few 'Lovecraft-meets-Dilbert' stories.

The Atrocity Archives comprises The Atrocity Archive & the sequel novella, The Concrete Jungle wherein the protagonist, Bob Howard, provides IT support for a fictional British Intelligence agency charged with stopping the horrors from the next dimension from encroaching into our universe.

The stories are set in a universe where the running of certain esoteric code on your PDA can inadvertently open portals into the dimensions where the horrors wait.

Not only does Bob have to keep Cthulhu etc. from encroaching into our dimension, he also has to justify his expenses to his pointy-haired manageress. The Concrete Jungle recently won a Hugo award for Best Novella.

A previous story that is available online, A Colder War, has a similar setting but is much more grim. Stross regards it as a 'dry run' for The Atrocity Archives.

I believe this is the book you're talking about.

Yeah, but that way you gotta watch out for them Langford Visual Hacks.

Note that 7.5 times earth's mass with twice earth's radius give a surface gravity of 7.5/2^2 or just slightly less than 1g. Might be a nice place to visit!

Why not build a bopamagilvie and call your Eustace, enk?

"What George Lucas may have seen as eternal in his "Star Wars" blockbusters, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique"

It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."

"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."

If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.

Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.

That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. . . .

One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. . . .

The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.

Somebody reads too much sience finction. The complete story is here:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/cosm.htm

6 years ago he was at the top of his career, doing great research, planning fantastic projects. Then illnesses hit like tornados, tearing his career and health away.

So you'd think he'd just want to kill himself-- how could you ever come to terms with such a change? But, you know, humans are resilient, and the desire to live is tenacious. He learned, most people there learned, to make the best of it. He did go the "Rage, rage" way a few times, but mostly he had peace. Contemplation. TV and music. Family visits. He was no more or less happy in the nursing home than before it all happened: just the focus of happiness changed.

Now, in contrast, the Nursing Home of 2904 is going to Rock. First, its not going to be a nursing home, but a regenerative center for people who need time off while cloned body parts are growing for the transplant. Or a cell-by-cell Hans Moravec style mind transfer zone. Or a place for people to live who want to review, organize and backup their entire lives before they die / copy themselves / do a massive personality change.

It doesn't have to be a home: it could be a life-support exoskeleton letting you wander the world. Or a Matrix-style feed, but one without crazed killer AIs. Unless you want them there. Unless Microsoft-RIAA has taken over, you'll have all the social networks, movies, music, books, interactives, VR worlds, MMOGs, and world's largest poker tournaments you've ever wanted to experience.

For food you can have direct olfactory / taste stimulation. For fun you can have direct any-other-type-of-nerve stimulation.

Yes, it will be a big change from the previous 860 years- a step down, a shrinking of your life. But you'll learn to adapt. People are resilient. If you choose to spend your last century in a nursing home (don't know why you'd choose that, but go ahead) you'll be just as happy as you were in the previous 900 years.

On the other hand, for a well-written SF noir on why immortality and the rich don't mix, try Richard Morgan's extraordinary Altered Carbon.

I know this is a pretty offtopic but I am now reading Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's "The Light of Other Days" where they introduce the concept of WormCams (*).

The WormCams are worm holes stabilized with negative energy (!) which can be used (somehow) as video cameras... so they can have instant access to anywhere in the universe... (I won't tell more cos I've spoiled enough :))

Anyway, I'm so immersed in the book that all this Hubble things now looks soooo outdated ;)...



Actually the book is a remake, as stated here: Bob Shaw's small, perfectly formed story 'The Light of Other Days' has enjoyed a prolonged life. It appeared in Analog in 1966 to widespread acclaim, and Shaw cover scanlater wrote sequel stories and expanded the concept into a novel, Other Days, Other Eyes (1972).

Based on the intriguing premise of 'slow glass', glass through which light takes years to travel, it remains one of the finest in 60s SF, and it is a small scandal that it is not now in print.

I believe no such algorithm can be implemented because a Turing Machine by its nature cannot solve such problems when confronted with them.

OK, you're right. But how do you know that there aren't problems which have the same effect on humans?

• Predicting how people will react to one or more significant changes to society, either in the future (most SF) or the past (the subgenre of Alternate History. Start with these 1,600+ stories.) The Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting a fundie future for the US. It did capture the feel of what happened in Afghanistan after the fundie Taliban took over.
• Predicting interesting uses for new technologies. Networks hadn't been out for that long when Brunner, and even before that Brin (or Benford? one of the 'killer B's') wrote about possibilities for worms and viruses in cyberspace.
• Extrapolating / having fun with an exponential growth or decay of an important resource. What if our population booms or crashes? What if the planet freezes or goes greenhouse? What if a person or computer gets vastly more intelligent than before?
• And the most important part of SF-- Sensawunda. The sense of wonder when you're pulled out of your own time and space and get to gaze (for the length of a book) through the eyes of other humans at a deep future, wide universe, and wide range of societies.
• and as part of Sensawunda-- inspiring the future... all the scientists inspired by Heinlein or LeGuin or Gibson ("Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading..."- C. Doctorow.) to go into the sciences or computing...

Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.

And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)

SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.

Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t

Try "TAP", by Greg Egan. (You'll see the tie-in at the end.)

As I recently wrote, SF movies are 30 years behind SF literature. Hollywood has barely been able to capture the feel of cyberpunk. I doubt that Hollywood could even start to do pre/post Singularity science fiction (which all of the above writers excel in).