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The main evidence that Roldugin is, indeed, one of Putin's close friends is that he is the godfather of Putin's daughter.

And the fact was known long before, it just wasn't of particular importance. Roldugin himself said that he's been a very close friend since 70s when he was interviewed for one of Putin's biographies (sorry, it is in Russian, but you can find the reference after using Google Translate or similar by searching for Roldugin's name). That biography came out in 2000.

I'm not talking about humans.
Particularly stock humans. As a stock human I could go for days just looking at the second hand on a watch making rounds.

I'm talking about aliens who have achieved immortality through... say... genetics, BUT inadvertently ticked off the check box for "curiosity" in the process.
Or better yet, like you say, ticked on the check box for boredom.

Not being bored because immortality is boring, but bored cause now they can't NOT BE bored.

The Borg would probably be bored out of their minds.
Plugged into all knowledge of all assimilated civilizations, processing at the maximum speed available, with new information trickling in slowly...
No wonder only one in the collective is NOT a mindless drone, and she is pissed off and bitchy all the time.

OR... They are NEVER BORED.
Think EVERYTHING being THE MOST EXCITING THING EVAR!
Somewhere out there, there's a planet covered in immortals, covered in millennial layers of dust of the ruins of their civilization - and they are "OMG!!! SOOOOOO EXCIIIITEEEEED!!!" about it all.
Like The Great Slow Kings, only very pleased about everything.

G18) Is there a UnixWare user's group?

Dan Busarow writes: The SCO Users Group can be reached electronically
as scoug@xenitec.on.ca. Subscription requests to
scoug-request@xenitec.on.ca.

http://lib.ru/UNIXFAQ/faq-unixware-general.txt

the billions of idle hands are trouble only because people can't set their own purpose - but if they could [...]

That little word "if" is the trouble here. USSR was trying to change the man for almost entire century and failed.

Golovachev has an interesting, if myopic view

Even later books of his are set in the Multiverse, where multiple societies, similar but minutely different, are depicted. The theme of societal decay is addressed in some of those "branches." Some of his books are officially available for free access as long as you know the language; I wouldn't use Google Translate there...

Sadly, the theme is not invented out of whole cloth, as many Fantasy writers do. It is very real. Most of the USA's social problems stem from the fact that large segments of population don't work, don't need to work, and are as matter of fact unemployable. Then they go out and entertain themselves as they may. Heard about "knockout kings?" That's them, geniuses at work. They are the fifth column of the modern civilization.

Perhaps the humankind can survive only apart from each other. We'd have no wars if anyone could at any time escape to his own, personal planet where nobody else could come without permission.

... from a very, very long time ago. It deals with the same topic, but it's much better. So good that I chose to take it as a mantra of my own. Definitely worth reading: link

Roger Zelazny can help. "The Great Slow Kings".

http://lib.ru/ZELQZNY/TheGreatSlowKings.txt

It will spread through various "online libraries" (mostly owned by proponents of "copyleft" - that is, theft of author's rights).

Some of Lukyanenko's works are published here with permission:

Starting June 1, 2003, all novels will be presented here only as fragments - a quarter or a third of the total text. Short stories will be still available in full. I'm also asking all owners of electronic libraries that are cooperating with authors to note this information and withdraw full texts of my novels, as well as all existing English translations of my works, from their sites.

It will spread through various "online libraries" (mostly owned by proponents of "copyleft" - that is, theft of author's rights).

Some of Lukyanenko's works are published here with permission:

Starting June 1, 2003, all novels will be presented here only as fragments - a quarter or a third of the total text. Short stories will be still available in full. I'm also asking all owners of electronic libraries that are cooperating with authors to note this information and withdraw full texts of my novels, as well as all existing English translations of my works, from their sites.

Yes, you can sell open source software, but only an idiot buys it without some kind of added value (like technical support). What kind of added value can an author of an ebook offer that would compel someone to buy it? None.

And that is because the open source developer shares some of his rights with the people downstream. Those guys can modify the software, look into the code and create documentation, make intelligent support decisions. This sharing of rights permits the next tier of people to make a living (by honestly working, of course.) A closed source app offers fewer possibilities for making money off of it; only the most complex commercial software (Windows) creates independent support niches, and even there people are limited to what they are told by the developer.

In the book world the author retains *all* rights. The user can only read; nothing else is permitted. This is exactly why there is no side revenue opportunities. For example, imagine the world where once you buy a book you are entitled to read and write fan fiction, and the more you buy the more is open to you, and you get higher karma (in /. terms,) and so on. Perhaps this is implemented as a web forum; or maybe as a virtual world, or a MMORPG... but there would be something that makes your investment into the story worthwhile. Otherwise it is indeed more practical to borrow a book at the library, read it and forget about it; and honestly what else can you *do* with a story today, aside from some emotional feelings while you were reading it?

There is an example of this approach already. Pavel Shumil in the course of his literary work developed a certain world (you figure it out what world it is, if you are interested.) Then he started a framework novel (called The Commodore's House (Dom Komandora, thank you, Slashcode, for sticking to 7-bit ASCII :-) This novel was then cooperatively written by the author himself and a bunch of fans, with the author overseeing the process, giving advices and otherwise making their lives interesting :-) It took 7 years, and the work was completed in 2008. Now, how much is it worth for a fan to be part of such a project? And how much is it worth for a less avid fan to be allowed to access the work in progress and submit suggestions and critique?

The HHTG series got less funny as it progressed, as Adams grew more frustrated with writing.
He hated writing with a passion, and often had to be locked in his office to meet deadlines. Since the fourth and fifth books of the trilogy were new material rather than expanded radio scripts, they suffer from this far more obviously - it took him eight years to write Mostly Harmless, with the other books all being released within two years of each-other.

I must also note that Adams already started on a sequel, (prequel) called Young Zaphod Plays It Safe Wiki

Unfortunately he suffered a TEF at the gym before he could finish it; his final joke.

If you have genuine interest in his works you'd probably benefit from checking out the soon-to-be-released BBC remake of Last Chance To See Wiki - A short documentary series following some of the worlds most endangered animals, Due to start September 6th on BBC2

The entire radio miniseries is available on the BBC website linked above, and is drenched in Adam's usual style.

If you want to follow the spirit of the book, find a copy of the text illegally on-line and download it to your phone!

Don't do that!!!

There should be no way to plug J345 into P346. Even with a sledgehammer. Three signatures is not enough.

True, but this is yet another obstacle on the road of "faster, cheaper, better" - connectors don't grow on trees, and it's already hard to get what you need. It doesn't get any easier if you start fiddling with shell sizes and insert configurations. A large entity can deal with it; a small company would rather use the same part number everywhere, even though it has a potential for a major failure.

we'd love to know who this author is

I read this novel only 2 days ago, so it still was in Firefox's history: Technocosm

It's fairly large, but here is the Google's translation of the relevant paragraph; I fixed some bugs of translation.

"I can not disclose to you all the secrets of our technology, but the surface of balloons will have virtually no friction on the air. The outer surface of the balloons will be adaptive. They will consist of nanomachines undergoing rapid microscopic movement to prevent the emergence of turbulence in the air. Archimedes's force shots balloons outside the atmosphere with tremendous speed. When the balloons are in a vacuum, nanomachines move closer, the bubble contracts, and high pressure starts building up inside. Pressurized gas will then be sent through the gas nozzle, creating reactive force, and this will push the module to the low Earth orbit. At the Earth orbit modules link up with our interplanetary tug and we send them to Jupiter."

As I said, I have no clue if this could possibly work - but why not if there are no constraints on the forces within the walls of such a balloon (a deus et machina.) In the story each balloon was supposed to lift a small payload, something about 5 to 10 kg.

But the story in general describes a method for advanced civilizations to travel and communicate between the stars and the galaxies if FTL travel is absolutely, unconditionally impossible.

I find it interesting that there is this notion that to believe in God, one must check their brain at the door. Christianity is simple enough for a child to understand and deep enough to satisfy the greatest minds in human history. If you truly value reason, I challenge you to some serious works in Christian apologetics, both modern and ancient. I suggest the book "mere christianity" by C.S. Lewis - http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt

In Christ's love, stoo

I do visit libraries often. I've read a couple dozen books last year. Of those, only two were on dead trees.

here's a few links for you:

http://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/wiwimod/index. php?page=Calendars

http://www.lib.ru/TOLKIEN/list.txt

http://www.tolkienbooks.net/html/calendars.htm

I own several 70's/80's calendars - there is no better artwork than what the older calendars have.

Take a look at one of Alan Lee's 1993 calendars: http://www.ludd.luth.se/users/bosse/books/93cal.ht ml. Magnificent.

----
Books: canon. Movies: If I'd seen the movies (WETA) before I'd read the books ("theatre of the mind"), I probably would have been more impressed.

Those who CAN imagine: read. Those who CAN'T imagine: watch.

Have you ever read Bulgakov's The Master and Margerita ?

A lustreless, sick voice sounded:

'Name?'

'Mine?' the arrested man hastily responded, his whole being expressing a readiness to answer sensibly, without provoking further wrath.

The procurator said softly:

'I know my own. Don't pretend to be stupider than you are. Yours.'

'Yeshua,' the prisoner replied promptly.

'Any surname?'

'Ha-Nozri.'

'Where do you come from?'

'The town of Gamala,' replied the prisoner, indicating with his head that there, somewhere far off to his right, in the north, was the town of Gamala.

'Who are you by blood?'

'I don't know exactly,' the arrested man replied animatedly, 'I don't remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian . .

'Where is your permanent residence?'

'I have no permanent home,' the prisoner answered shyly, 'I travel from town to town.'

'That can be put more briefly, in a word - a vagrant,' the procurator said, and asked:

'Any family?'

'None. I'm alone in the world.'

'Can you read and write?'

'Yes.'

'Do you know any language besides Aramaic?'

'Yes. Greek.'

A swollen eyelid rose, an eye clouded with suffering fixed the arrested man. The other eye remained shut.

Pilate spoke in Greek.

'So it was you who was going to destroy the temple building and called on the people to do that?'

Here the prisoner again became animated, his eyes ceased to show fear, and he spoke in Greek:

'Never, goo...' Here terror flashed in the prisoner's eyes, because he had nearly made a slip. 'Never, Hegemon, never in my life was I going to destroy the temple building, nor did I incite anyone to this senseless act.'

Surprise showed on the face of the secretary, hunched over a low table and writing down the testimony. He raised his head, but immediately bent it to the parchment again.

'All sorts of people gather in this town for the feast. Among them there are magicians, astrologers, diviners and murderers,' the procurator spoke in monotone, 'and occasionally also Ears. You, for instance, are a liar. It is written clearly - "Incited to destroy the temple". People have testified to it.'

'These good people,' the prisoner spoke and, hastily adding 'Hegemon', went on: '... haven't any learning and have confused everything I told them. Generally, I'm beginning to be afraid that this confusion may go on for a very long time. And all because he writes down the things I say incorrectly.'

Silence fell. By now both sick eyes rested heavily on the prisoner.

'I repeat to you, but for the last time, stop pretending that you're a madman, robber,' Pilate said softly and monotonously, 'there's not much written in your record, but what there is is enough to hang you.'

'No, no, Hegemon,' the arrested man said, straining all over in his wish to convince, 'there's one with a goatskin parchment who follows me, follows me and keeps writing all the time. But once I peeked into this parchment and was horrified. I said decidedly nothing of what's written there. I implored him: "Burn your parchment, I beg you!" But he tore it out of my hands and ran away.'

'Who is that?' Pilate asked squeamishly and touched his temple with his hand.

'Matthew Levi,' the prisoner explained willingly. 'He used to be a tax collector, and I first met him on the road in Bediphage, where a fig grove juts out at an angle, and I got to talking with him. He treated

I'm tempted to learn Russian just so I can read all that SF. (I can kinda pronounce the cyrillic, so I recognize a lot of the authors here.) At least "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" is in English...

http://www.lib.ru/~moshkow/

Well, AoMP3 was nice while it lasted. But mostly I care about http://www.lib.ru/ - it's the best Internet library in Russia.

But we still have a hope, there's a Russian proverb: "Drastic Russian laws are softened by their loose observance". So I hope that lib.ru will continue to work 'underground'.

Or it could just be looking for a comment with a particular subject. Who knows?

USeR l l l l
NiCK n1-e6f01a0d
USeRHOST n1-e6eb410c
JOiN #n1 nert4mp1
!Q gfcagihehehadkcpcpgngfgegjgbcohagjhihagpgogecogdgp gncpgmdjhcgedgghcogkhagh
FoRm oN mY wIng
aTtack http://www.lib.ru/
dRop sPam -tYpe:viagra tftp@*.com

"Hardware routers only block incoming traffic"

He was simply one of the most extraordinary people that modern history has known. http://lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/FEINMAN/feinman_engl.txt That probably infringes somebodies copyright somewhere, but it's like Shakespeare or Aspirin - too good to not freely share.

Well, my favorite music band ( http://dartz.spb.ru/ ) has all its songs in public access ( http://music.lib.ru/t/the_dar/alb4.shtml ) and earns money from concerts.

So it's quite possible to earn money not only from CD sales.

Grab it while you can. English and Russian versions. Alas, no annotations included (I'd pay for them!). P.S. The second link is an online library that actually honors remove requests from the right holders/authors.

I remember talking to a psychologist once who, once learning that I was a computer guy, suggested that combining a form of auto-entraining hypnosis with some creative input devices you could easily make an immersive environment with today's technology. The only problem is that by allowing yourself to be hypnotised you're putting yourself into a highly suggestive state (duh, that's how it works) and as such you really need to trust the creator of the experience that you are being fed. If, for example, you're experiencing an online environment, you're allowing random unknown people to have intimate access to your mind. Not exactly something I'd be interested in doing. But consider the fiction of Neuromancer: "a consensual hallucination". That's what we're talking about here. The dangers experienced by Case were real and could lead to his death if he took on a system he couldn't control. Regardless, Case accepted the risks because the rewards were so great.. perhaps that kind of attitude is something we should strive towards. Our aversion to risk is limiting our sensory perception of our shared experiences. We're limited to screens and keyboards. Sure, our screens have gotten bigger and more colourful and we've got joysticks and mice, and surround sound, but the experience of cyberspace is so poor compared to meatspace. And that's not getting any better.

I was reminded of Bruce Sterling's Think of the Prestige.

We need some successful manned missions so we can do more interesting stuff than orbit Earth.

1992 called, no we don't.

In the modern world, with the cost of copying and disseminating a digital work approaching zero, what value do publishers actually add?

I have found out that:

1. Linux from Mandrake is far better than the one from Stallman and Linus (fine tuned, more tools, and those nice disks instead of zillion URLs half of which works).

2. A well printed book is better than one from http://www.lib.ru/, it's nicer, it saves my eyes, and it's just a pleasure to hold it in hands. Oh yeah, and a good book contains little mistakes -- a good editor is expencive to hire!

3. When it comes to music... well... the publisher should probably just sort awailable works. So yeah, when it comes to music you're right -- and don't forget that live shows should be attended, or the musicians die from starvation.

4. Pictures... hm. Let's say a gallery is a publisher, it can keep the pictures from occasional damage for ages! And visiting a real gallery is better than viewing some pictures online.

So, I think that the value publisher adds is proven and I can got back to work :)

If someone wanted to help PG with lotsa dinero and free hosting, they should instead help Lib.Ru. In Russia all works created before 1973 are in public domain, so if you want to create a worldwide repository of valuable creative works, it makes sense to do it in a country with somewhat sensible copyright term lengths.

Correction: I saw it first in 1996, and here is the link. It's all in Russian, pictures are bad quality, and of the then-presidential-candidates. However, it makes pretty much the same point :-)

Chapter I : Knee Deep in the Dead
Anonymous marine lands on the Phobos moon of Mars. The research base appears to be crawling with zombies and he blows his way through them eventually blasting some bigger demons and teleporting to ...

Chapter II : Shores of Hell

.. Mars! Mars base overrun by demonic alien scumbags. Our Hero slaughters them by the truckload, occasionally using the chainsaw! Finally he kills the giant missile launching robot cyberdemon and takes the plunge and heads off into..

Chapter III : Inferno

.. Hell itself! After laying waste to Satan's Army he confronts giant mecha robo cyber Arachnodemon and kills him! (Duh!) Go team Earth!

Full text of the Doom book "Knee Deep in the Dead": http://lib.ru/INOFANT/DOOM/doom1_knee_deep_in_the_ dead-engl.txt

The Doom comic! Yes! Quotable! Read it! http://www.doomworld.com/10years/doomcomic/

It's EASY to make good quality cult movie out of that! (But I'm betting they'll screw it up anyway - it's not like this is Peter Jackson).

My uncle -- high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him --
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
When will the devil come for you?

My uncle, matchless moral model.
When deathly ill, learned how to make
His friends respect him. bow and coddle
Of all his ploys, that takes the cake.
To others, this might teach a lesson:

But Lord above, I'd fed such stress in
Having to sit there night and day.
Daring not once to step away.
Plus, I'd say. Its hypocritical
To keep the half-dead's spirlts bright.
To plump his plilows till they're right,
Fetch his pills with tears veridical
Yet in secret to wish and sigh.
'Hurry, dear Uncle, up and die!'

My uncle, of the best traditions,
When being almost deceased,
Forced men to treat him with distinction,
Which was the best of his ideas.
Yes, his example - to us for learning,
But, Heavens, how it is boring
To sit with him all day and night,
Not having right to step aside!
What a deplorable deception
To entertain the man, half-dead,
To fix a pillow in his bed,
To give him drugs with sad attention,
To sigh and think in deeps of heart:
When will the deuce take you apart?

You should consider going to this page, although it's in Russian it should be quite helpful if you are looking for the free, search-based, text access... and twice more if you are a spammer!

1. For 98% of the slashdot crowd, I'll assure you that 6 megapixels is enough.

I'd say 3 is probably good enough for 95%. I have a Nikon Coolpix 3100. It's not a photo geek's dream, though I as a regular geek have taken some stunning photos with it -- enough for people to question that I even took some of them.

My only wishes;

The improvements introduced in the 3200 -- plus...

Better low light support (if the camera doesn't get too bulky).

Raw image support.

From what I've read, Cannon rules if you want to control every aspect of your shot. The Nikons are point and shoot with many pre-programmed modes -- so if you already have your hands full with other tech, it's the way to go. (Something that came to mind as I wrote this.)

Well, it's possible.... in Russia. Statisctics for Lib.ru :
On 1 Oct 2003 library contains 4000Mb in 21200 text items.

Most of Lib.ru is in Russian (of course!), but it contains some English-translated texts: Russian prose and science fiction in English translation Envy :)

Well, it's possible.... in Russia. Statisctics for Lib.ru :
On 1 Oct 2003 library contains 4000Mb in 21200 text items.

Most of Lib.ru is in Russian (of course!), but it contains some English-translated texts: Russian prose and science fiction in English translation Envy :)

Globalhead is uneven, but the good stuff ("Our Neural Chernobyl", "The Shores of Bohemia") is really, really good.

Agreed -- not all of the Globalhead stories make the grade -- but don't miss "We See Things Differently" -- my God, that's a great story!

Sterling has an amazing gift for writing political fiction -- he writes American characters, Arab characters, Russian characters ... and man, you are there, you become an American, an Arab, a Russian.

Also not to be missed: "Red Star, Winter Orbit" -- short story, collaboration with William Gibson, appears in Gibson's "Burning Chrome" collection.

-kgj

Yea, right - find a person who has no clue about anything, and ask her "a question of cosmic proportions", to cite Prof. Preobrazhensky... I bet she also has a fully formed opinion about usefulness of synchrotrons, and is ready to advise humanity on how useless tensors are (since she can't buy them at Wal-Mart.)

These people are flatlanders - always were, and always will be. People that can't lift their eyes off the ground and look into the sky. People who think inside the box and are proud of that. People who want to stop you from looking up.

This is a well known flaw of democracy. It breeds mediocrity, because every social innovation tends to be suppressed if it does not serve the most immediate needs of the society, since the society in its voting average is stupid.

One truly may wish to have a Space Tyrant as a ruler; maybe ruthless sometimes, but smart and with a vision - not that circus of politicians who don't even know what a vision is, and who bury the society deeper and deeper every year.

Unbeknownst to most foreigners, the ebook revolution is actually lead by Russia. While project Gutenberg might have been founded in the 70s, its size is nothing compared to the benemoth of Russian Internet text distribution.

L I B . R U

Lib.Ru was found in 1994 and today it has more than 20000 books (3 times more than Gutenberg), 4.2Gb in size. It's monthly traffic is more than a terabyte - almost half a million visitors and more than 20 million documents downloaded. Unlike Gutenberg, Lib.Ru has many copyrighted books available, many of them brand-new and many distributed with authors' permissions.

Unbeknownst to most foreigners, the ebook revolution is actually lead by Russia. While project Gutenberg might have been founded in the 70s, its size is nothing compared to the benemoth of Russian Internet text distribution.

L I B . R U

Lib.Ru was found in 1994 and today it has more than 20000 books (3 times more than Gutenberg), 4.2Gb in size. It's monthly traffic is more than a terabyte - almost half a million visitors and more than 20 million documents downloaded. Unlike Gutenberg, Lib.Ru has many copyrighted books available, many of them brand-new and many distributed with authors' permissions.

dunno - what about posting this link?

The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's UNIQUE (at least to modern popular TV-centric culture).

The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's UNIQUE (at least to modern popular TV-centric culture).

Some Strugatsky novels are online here:

http://lib.ru/TRANSLATION/

Prisoners of Power is a good one also.

I think AR stuff is pretty cool. Those sunglasses in Virtual Light, Gargoyles in Snow Crash, it's a pretty darn useful information tool, as long as the information is useful and trustworthy. To that end, I feel that corporations should be kept as far away from this as possible. Otherwise AR will be a mass of ads, spam and lies.

I think a link to a personal datasource is the way to go, with various connections to trusted information providers. If the map company decides to put ads in its building descriptions, disconnect from their service and join with one who doesn't. You should be able to put on your goggles and see NOTHING AT ALL, and add only the stuff you want.

Personal datasources might link to other people's sources, in a kind of collaberative system that allows feedback ("you liked that bar? It SUCKED!") and filtering (browsing the world at +5 to avoid the trolls and goatse.cx).

In order to further clean up the datastream, rocksolid specs for different types of data should be established, probably using XML. No executables either, that way people can't stick Flash animations or viruses in their location descriptions.

I wonder if use of these kind of info-tools will result in weakened memory, sense of direction, etc... not to mention the social awkwardness of people staring off into space while they process the latest blip.

Oh, kinda off-topic: I googled and found what looks to be the full text of Virtual Light by William Gibson.

One of the URLs above is for Sergey Lukjanenko's Labyrinth of Reflections, which I'm now reading as it was recommend by a Russian friend. Here is the URL linkified: http://lib.ru/LUKXQN/labirintengl.txt

Yup, ABS are rad, especially their later books. The earlier ones may have too much of socialist naivete; the later ones are bitter and somewhat haunting. Roadside Picnic (the proto-story of Stalker the movie) and Lame Fortune (never translated into English, I believe) are the best IMHO. Monday Begins On Saturday is the Soviet equivalent of the HHGTTG: a geeks' delight.

Pelevin is not SF, at least not in the "science" category. But his fiction is curious and playful. Expect a lot of impenetrable jokes and references to things unfamiliar to you due to "cultural differences". You haven't heard all those funny stories about Chapaev and Petka, have you?

Another SF (this being "serious" fiction again, not "science") master is Vladimir Sorokin. Absolutely mindboggling stuff, being an excellent prose on its own.

Andrey Platonov, I think, is one of the most overlooked Russian writers of the 20th century. His stretches of Russian reality of 1920s-1930s are beautifully absurd and sarcastic -- think Kafka meets Ionesco meets Orwell.

I am really glad to see the unlikely break of microsoft-flaming and transmeta-worshipping programming schedule on slashdot - especially since it has to do with good books from Eastern-bloc countries. I wil second all recommendations already given for the Strugatsky brothers. Hwever, when I think of Russian sci-fi, the first name that actually comes to mind is Polish.

Stanilsaw Lem, a Polish author who is immensely popular in Russia and many European countries (but, alas, poorly known in the states) is, in my opinion, the most incredible sci-fi author I've ever had the privielege of reading. His books are above and beyond what is commonly referred to as "science fiction" by the people I meet. Lem's prevailing notion is that a laser gun on a spaceship does not make a rehashed soap opera plot into something that may be classified into the science fiction genre.

Lem's books go a full range from hillarious to serious to outright bizarre. His "Memoirs found in a bathtub" was Terry Gilliam's inspiration while the latter was shooting Brazil. Lem's "Solaris" has been made into an amazing movie by Russia's cinematography great Andrei Tarkovsky - and more likely than not, it is available in your local blockbuster or library. I can go on and on, but I figured that if you (the reader) have made it this far down this post, I might as well provide the links and let you figure out if that sounds like something you'd like to read for yourself. So,

Planet Solaris - The Official Lem site

A brief biography and overview of books

If you can read Russian, this contains the translations of the bulk of his work into Russian.

A really good fan site, with overviews of all major works

A short passage from The Cyberiad - one of Lem's most famous collections of short stories

List of Stanislaw Lem's books, sorted by average customer review rating, at amazon

Take care!

PsychoOne

There is a lot of Russian books that are getting
published(OCR?) on the net, one thing I stubled on were real stories from Afganistan and Chechen Wars, they are incredible, told by real soldiers not writers. I only found one translated to English, but they're maybe more available.(I read them in Russian).

http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/CHECHNYA/chechen_war.txt

P.S. from SciFi I recomend brothers Strugatsky books, specificaly Roadside Picnic.

Don't become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don't read Shakespeare. Read Webster's revenge plays. Don't read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he's off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don't read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn't come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you're here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

And when it comes to studying art, well, study it, but study it to your own purposes. If you're obsessively weird enough to be a good weird artist, you generally face a basic problem. The basic problem with weird art is not the height of the ceiling above it, it's the pitfalls under its feet. The worst problem is the blundering, the solecisms, the naivete of the poorly socialized, the rotten spots that you skid over because you're too freaked out and not paying proper attention. You may not need much characterization in computer entertainment. Delineating character may not be the point of your work. That's no excuse for making lame characters that are actively bad. You may not need a strong, supple, thoroughly worked-out storyline. That doesn't mean that you can get away with a stupid plot made of chickenwire and spit. Get a full repertoire of tools. Just make sure you use those tools to the proper end. Aim for the heights of professionalism. Just make sure you're a professional *game designer.*

You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit. Popular media always reek of bullshit, they reek of carelessness and self-taught clumsiness and charlatanry. To live outside the aesthetic laws you must be honest. Know what you're doing; don't settle for the way it looks just cause everybody's used to it. If you've got a palette of 2 million colors, then don't settle for designs that look like a cheap four-color comic book. If you're gonna do graphic design, then learn what good graphic design looks like; don't screw around in amateur fashion out of sheer blithe ignorance. If you write a manual, don't write a semiliterate manual with bad grammar and misspellings. If you want to be taken seriously by your fellows and by the populace at large, then don't give people any excuse to dismiss you. Don't be your own worst enemy. Don't put yourself down.