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Yes. cf. Cory Doctorow: Demon-Haunted World

I think the above article should be mandatory reading.

Cf. "Digging the Weans" by Robert Nathan.

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/08/gary-westfahl-addled-archaeology-of.html

Note that this song was nominated for a Hugo in 2011. Rachel even came and performed it live at the 2011 Worldcon.

While the MPAA is wrong, this article is a bit of a strawman. The Avengers being a a big-budget, special effects laden film, is the sort of film seen best in a movie theater. And obviously it's all-but-impossible to replicate the 3D experience with a pirate copy (whether you like 3D or not). A smaller, quieter independent film, something that doesn't lose much by being seen on TV, might suffer more from pirating.

FWIW, I liked The Avengers the best of any live-action superhero film I've seen. Granted, the half-naked Scarlett Johansson didn't hurt...

patent and trade mark is left to businesses

And so don't the similar harsh penalties for what once used to be organized economic crime strike you as disproportionate at least in some copyright cases where it has been reduced to as little as an inadvertent mouse click?

Cf. http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html - and that's by a published author who makes a living selling his works.

66% lower is very conservative indeed but maybe not in the way you think. I assume he wouldn't sell more copies if he had no free downloads. There are other authors that are selling and giving away the same book at the same time (e.g. Cory Doctorow, Peter Watts). They seem to believe that if they stop giving away ebooks the sales of the dead-tree copies would suffer, they wouldn't be as renowned and that would affect their income (e.g. Doctorow tours and gets paid to lecture). Those are proven and successful businesses so if I were starting a career as book author I'd follow their steps: almost no advertising costs, a lot of readers, a fair amount of money, sounds good.

But I'm digressing. Let's back my position with some facts. This is an excerpt from http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/09/cory-doctorow-freekonomic-e-books.html (Sept 2007.)

Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book — and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched.

That's why I believe that our author actually benefited from giving away all those copies for free.

By the way, I clicked on the link to download the book and discovered it is about Ubuntu 8.10. It's terribly outdated so it's not something somebody would buy nowadays but be sure that I wouldn't have bought it even two years ago when I switched from Win XP to Ubuntu 8.10. I'd be counted as one of those 445 free downloads per actual sales but I would have just deleted the file after having browsed through the pages. Downloading costs nothing so people just download, look, delete.

Okay, so let's say Nicolas Carr is right, and we need something to help us concentrate deeply in the face of the ecosystem of interruption technologies.

Is there a technical fix for this? I'm thinking something like an X windows hack that will force you to stay inside your text editor for an hour.

Cory Doctorow had an essay that speaks to this point recently: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

TL;DR: Even if you're clueful and security-conscious most of the time, all it takes is one momentary mistake, and nobody can be perfect. Phishers and scam artists know this, and attack constantly and without cease, so that even though they fail 99.9999% of the time, those few successes yield great returns.

Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others.

When I was in high school, I couldn't grasp that kind of stuff. It took some years of autonomy, bureaucracy, voting, and workplace interaction before I could get a personal sense of these issues -- e.g., maintaining your household, waiting on hold to straighten out a billing error, workplace politics. Much good science fiction describes grand visions of the items at the scale you're referring to, but do your highschoolers have the autonomy and responsibility to extrapolate their own personal experience to social, industrial, political, military goings-on at the city, state, national, planetary, galactic scale?

In my uninformed opinion, I'd go with

• stories that describe the interactions of individuals or smaller groups of people set on a smaller stage
• The Nebula awards list Andre Norton award for best Young Adult Sci-Fi and Locus's own Young Adult list
• short stories (Arena by Frederic Brown comes to mind, but I read it pre-highschool) that can't lay out a huge, textured world and society in a short format but nevertheless get a good story with strong science fiction or fantasy elements across.

I'd then try to gauge their reactions and opinions and whether/how they can understand or identify emotionally or intellectually with the stories and characters. You can always work your way up to the bigger issues should some subset of your students show interest or aptitude in understanding them.

One counterpoint to this is that science fiction explicitly provides a sense of scale for these things and lays out these larger issues for detailed examination. As such, it may serve your students if they (and you) are exposed to the concepts now and it can later inform their future experience when they're more directly confronted with these ideas.

Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others.

When I was in high school, I couldn't grasp that kind of stuff. It took some years of autonomy, bureaucracy, voting, and workplace interaction before I could get a personal sense of these issues -- e.g., maintaining your household, waiting on hold to straighten out a billing error, workplace politics. Much good science fiction describes grand visions of the items at the scale you're referring to, but do your highschoolers have the autonomy and responsibility to extrapolate their own personal experience to social, industrial, political, military goings-on at the city, state, national, planetary, galactic scale?

In my uninformed opinion, I'd go with

• stories that describe the interactions of individuals or smaller groups of people set on a smaller stage
• The Nebula awards list Andre Norton award for best Young Adult Sci-Fi and Locus's own Young Adult list
• short stories (Arena by Frederic Brown comes to mind, but I read it pre-highschool) that can't lay out a huge, textured world and society in a short format but nevertheless get a good story with strong science fiction or fantasy elements across.

I'd then try to gauge their reactions and opinions and whether/how they can understand or identify emotionally or intellectually with the stories and characters. You can always work your way up to the bigger issues should some subset of your students show interest or aptitude in understanding them.

One counterpoint to this is that science fiction explicitly provides a sense of scale for these things and lays out these larger issues for detailed examination. As such, it may serve your students if they (and you) are exposed to the concepts now and it can later inform their future experience when they're more directly confronted with these ideas.

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/09/cory-doctorow-freekonomic-e-books.html

when you say participate, you mean steal copyrighted content right?
If not, what is the problem?

rifftrax can't be watched if DRM exists, neither can AMV's or mashup projects like fsFs

99% of the material on the internet is infringing. The only reason copyright hasn't been used to shut down the ENTIRE world wide web is lax enforcement.
your typical myspace page carries hundreds of infringing images, infringing quotes, infringing music, etc. etc.

Of course, this is the reason practically everything that becomes popular gets shut down. People notice "their" material on the site, whether it be images, videos, print quotes, whatever, and kill it dead "as an example".

I refer you to this writeup on the reason why copyright is out of control, and in direct opposition to modern cultural norms.

To sum up, please be more vigilant about all the material around you which is copyrighted, and avoid swallowing propaganda whole.

I wonder: did they invite people like Cory Doctorow?
Did they invite people like Eric Flint?

Or are they only going to listen to voices from the dark side, the side that believes culture was invented to make big companies rich and where "non-commercial" is a profanity?

Most things by baen I'll check into pretty quick.
I love thier free library and their DRM free ebooks.

If I'm still lacking I'll check this:
http://www.locusmag.com/
I usually check thier list of books recently published in last month or whatever.

If there's a book I think I'm interested in, I'll check into it further (they link authors website or publishers website for instance), and one thing I'll often do if its a new author or series is check amazon. If it has a decent average score and/or reviews I'll grab it.

Also sometimes browsing library or bookstore helps too.

Locus Magazine is a real magazine put together by Science Fiction Fans (notably Charlie Brown who has received many Hugo awards for it). Contains lots of reviews, you'll learn which reviewers have the same taste as you. Yeah, it's not a book club.
The Young Adult section of the library (don't sneer - the quality of the Science Fiction there is very high) shouldn't be forgotten. Cory's Little Brother is a must-read, and is a YA novel.

I'm tempted by the Sony but not the Kindle. I'd never buy a device so comprehensively tied to one supplier.

As for ebooks, Cory Doctorow posted an article just days ago in which he states that ebooks should be more like dandelion seeds than babies. Chuck out as many as possible and hope they survive. (Okay, so some parents do this anyway, but you get the idea.)

In that vein: Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter, KIm Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford. Have a look at and more generally, Locus.

You might like to have a look at "Slow Life", by Michael Swanwick.
http://www.analogsf.com/Hugos/slowlife.shtml

It's a nice sci-fi novelette (that won the Hugo in 2003) about life in the deep seas of Titan.
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/Hugo2003.htm
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/Hugo2003.html#nvt

"Is there life on Titan? Probably not. It's cold down there! 94 Kelvin is the same as -179 Celsius, or -290 Fahrenheit. And yet . . . life is persistent. It's been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we'll be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that's where we'll find it."

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

• http://slashdot.org/ - not blocked when I tested, but periodically blocked
• http://cnn.com/ - not blocked at the moment, but periodically blocked
• http://ralan.com/ & http://locusmag.com/ (Sci Fi market info) - blocked.
• http://thehaws.org/ (my site) - not blocked... which is kind of disappointing

Second, was the story corrected at some point or something? I see "Camouflage" on the story and I see "Camouflage" at the awards page and I see "Camouflage" at Webster's. Is your concern with "Camouflage," or was there another (incorrect) spelling on the original piece? This is driving me nuts. Please let me know. Thanks.

Of the ones you mention I've used FantasticFiction more than once, perhaps because it came up first on the Google search.

There's the CBDB for comic books.

And The Locus Index for science fiction and fantasy works, featuring short stories (which is no small task).

Alex.

So I couldn't help but notice that this article is just a dupe.

Apparently, a link to a blog with a couple paragraphs and screenshots of a service that has been covered before is newsworthy. Not in my opinion.

Oh, and if you go to that blog that's linked in the article, there is a "Contact Us" tab which results in the same e-mail that the author of this article (Tam Hanna) linked to their name. This isn't a review, it's a "Oooh, this is neat" article which is odd considering I have a Google Pages account and it's not that neat--it's functional and simplistic but limiting. And please do notice the ads (some by Google) surrounding Tam Hanna's blog. So they'll be making some cash off the Slashdot effect. What a tool Slashdot has become.

If you want an example of something they rejected to bring you a duped article, here's one I submitted this morning that some of you may or may not care about:

About a week ago, Robert Jordan wrote a letter to Locus in which he stated he has amyloidosis. Amyloidosis is a rare blood disease that leaves patients with a median of one (no treatment) to four (with treatment) years left to live. He confirmed this on his publisher's website. This is devastating news for fantasy enthusiasts but on his blog he spoke about the Wheel of Time series: "Worse comes to worst, I will finish A Memory of Light, so the main story arc, at least, will be completed." Let us all wish him a permanent recovery--if he can write the epic tomes of the Wheel of Time, surely beating amyloidosis will be trivial.

Truly his translation are a work of art. I was not really surprised to find that he wrote a few books too...

http://www.locusmag.com/1997/Issues/03/Kandel.html
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/bio.php?transla tor=Michael+Kandel

Kudos for him on this sad day for SF fans.

Pete

And for the confused, read this.

"There have been winners who wrote first in another language which was then translated to English - I can think of a few who first wrote the story in French and the English translation won a Hugo."

Actually, not.

It would be nice if it were otherwise, but your memory is performing an act of wishful thinking. No work of fiction not originally published in English has ever won a Hugo.

Yup, that's how I first read it, but no, I didn't think "oh those Slashdot editors". Instead I thought, "cool, I'm sick of fantasy stories winning what is supposed to be basically an SF award. Fantasy has it's own awards!

Anyway, I've been losing respect for the Hugos for some time now. The Hugo voters seem to be increasingly insular and out-of-touch. My favorite genre awards right now are the Locus Awards, which usually have more voters than the Hugo and Nebula combined. Plus, they have separate categories for fantasy and SF.

Anyway, I thought ROTS was good, but not great. My full review can be found here.

I like Howard's non-fiction as well as his fiction, which is one of the reasons I wrote some movie reviews with him:

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
• The Incredibles

I like Howard's non-fiction as well as his fiction, which is one of the reasons I wrote some movie reviews with him:

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
• The Incredibles

I like Howard's non-fiction as well as his fiction, which is one of the reasons I wrote some movie reviews with him:

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• The Fabulous World of Jules Verne.
• The Incredibles

"I gave up short story writing for a while when I started writing novels (which I think every writer does), but I've started doing it again. What spurred me to it was Bradbury going crazy about Fahrenheit 9/11, saying Michael Moore was a crook for having stolen his title. For a champion of free expression, in the original Fahrenheit 451, to assert that the person who comes up with the meme has the right to control the condition as to who can riff on that meme is not just ironic, it's ludicrous! So I started writing a whole batch of new stories that had the same titles as famous science fiction. I've finished an 'Anda's Game' and an 'I, Robot' and my next one might be a 'Jeffty Is Five'. Ellison's original 'Jeffty' is an anti-technological story -- Harlan's an antitechnological guy. He told us at Clarion that we should get offline and stop screwing around (the best advice I ever ignored). I'm just going to play with that for a while and see how it goes. Let a thousand 'Nightfall's bloom!"

"SF should open minds by promoting science and scientific thinking [...] It cannot be done if one talks about magicians."

SF should do all that, but mostly it doesn't (Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything, roughly speaking, is crap). But the point you seem to be missing is that it can be done by talking about magicians! All you need for science is a universe with a consistent, logical, and testable set of rules. They don't have to be the rules of our universe; they just have to be rules that can be inferred with the scientific method, and then you've got a basis for science.

In fact, rigorous scientific fantasy (as opposed to sheer fantasy with SF trappings like Star Wars) has two benefits: it shows that science is a general purpose tool, not just a set of rules we've uncovered about our own universe, and it exposes people to scientific thinking who would ordinarily turn up their noses at science fiction.

That aside, I have to confess that it does bug me a little when a pure fantasy story (e.g. Harry Potter) wins the Hugo. Still, I think it's years too late to change the rules at this point, so I'm just hoping that a science fiction novel will win the World Fantasy Award one of these days[*]! :)

In the mean time, I think the Locus Awards are better awards overall. The Hugo may be better known, but the Hugo voters seem to be a weird and insular crowd. The Locus awards seem to have a much broader base of voters, and best of all, have separate categories for Best SF and Best Fantasy! :)

[*] In fact, the World Fantasy Award in 1981 was given to Gene Wolfe's _Shadow of the Torturer_, which did turn out to be SF, although it wasn't completely clear until its sequels appeared.

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.

L Sprague de Camp was doing that back in the 1930s. For that matter, Mark Twain did it with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889, and Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels in 1726.

Whether you like their work or not, all of the individuals listed have had enormous influence on the field. The museum should include people important in the history of SF, whatever their roles, just as, e.g., history museums should include exhibits on people who did both Really Good and Really Bad things.

BTW, Charles Brown is the editor of Locus, one of the most influential magazines in the SF field. He's not famous, but he's got a lot of pull.

Ooh! I once got nominated for an award that I didn't win. (Other Fan Achievement, woo!) I never told anyone what I would have said, so can I call Cory arrogant, please? :^) (Just kidding Cory. A Nebula nomination is no small deal.)

There's a great science fiction story on the topic of finding fossilized evidence of past life on Mars called "The Carhart Shale", by Grant Callin, which appeared, among other places, in Analog Science Fiction and Fact [v113 #12, October 1993].

You can find some reviews of works on the list, plus other related info, at various places on the Locus Online site. For example:

Book and Magazine Reviews Index (last updated Nov. '03)

Claude Lalumiere's Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003

The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.

Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.

You can find some reviews of works on the list, plus other related info, at various places on the Locus Online site. For example:

Book and Magazine Reviews Index (last updated Nov. '03)

Claude Lalumiere's Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003

The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.

Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.

You can find some reviews of works on the list, plus other related info, at various places on the Locus Online site. For example:

Book and Magazine Reviews Index (last updated Nov. '03)

Claude Lalumiere's Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003

The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.

Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.

You can find some reviews of works on the list, plus other related info, at various places on the Locus Online site. For example:

Book and Magazine Reviews Index (last updated Nov. '03)

Claude Lalumiere's Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2003

The Best Books of 2003 Tally provides info on which (and how many) year's-best lists various books were listed on; may give you a little more info than the combined lists, though the sources are different for this list.

Also note that the 2003 Book Directory doesn't link only to Amazon; it also provides links to reviews when such are available online.

Here's their list from last year. Me, I'd rather buy 4 good paperbacks than 1 hardcover, and I only found one book from the new list available in paperback (admittedly, I only looked for 20-25).

And someone rememeber to remind me to revisit this list next year.

Cheers
-b

I agree it's unwieldy, but the Locus List has to be big to accomodate all Locus'es editorial staff. I mean, the magazine is basically nothing but reviews. If you want to thin the herd a little, try looking at some of the stuff nominated for the various awards or better yet at various reviewers personal best lists (sorry - couldn't find any links offhand).

I've always thought the system proposed by (Kim Stanley Robinson) in the Mars Trilogy books was kinda neat

Robinson didn't come up with the idea, but borrowed it (affectionately) from Philip K Dick's novel Martian Time-Slip. KSR actually wrote his doctoral thesis on PK Dick, by the way.

Here (compliments of Locus

It should be neat to track it up up the best seller lists (Locus summarizes SF titles from the major lists weekly).

For kicks, look at the bottom of the page and try to guess which opening paragraph goes with which reviewed book.

What makes Spider Robinson a commentator on SF, Sci-Fi or anything else other than pablum?

And as for the 'Speculative Fiction', well, he isn't a writer of that either.

Guh. I should know better than to fail to preview at eight in the morning.

The page is here.

--grendel drago

Spider Robinson, the living definition of the hack SF author who survives purely by pandering to his arrested-adolescent fanbase and recycling the same appallingly trite scenario into an endless stream of identical "novels," is complaining about the state of modern SF writing?

Oh! The! Irony!

If speculative fiction needs to be saved from anything, it's the Spider Robinsons, Mercedes Lackeys and Piers Anthonys of the world. If they're complaining, that's probably a good sign -- hopefully that people are starting to spend their money on books by authors with actual talent rather than the 2,387th entry in the Callahan's Cross-Time Dragonquest for Telepathic Cats series.