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The 1954 novella "The Houses of Iszm" by Jack Vance postulated custom-grown treehouse homes. From Rich Horton's review:

I didn't like The Houses of Iszm quite as much [as "Son of the Tree"], though by and large it's fairly comparable in quality. It even shares a trope -- trees big enough to live in. The planet Iszm controls the supply of these trees by strictly preventing the export of female trees. Ailie Farr is a botanist who comes to Iszm and eventually gets involved in a scheme to steal a female tree, with surprising results. [...] Again, a nice story for early Vance, not a classic.

Oh, and don't hold your breath. You will only suffer a burst lung, or at the very least embolisms...

Linq

I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!

Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.

Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.

Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.

Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.

Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.

Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.

Except what you provided isn't really a plot, but synopsis.

No, it's a plot. Your definition of plot on its own is inadequate. For one, 'plot' and 'synopsis' are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms. For another, ideas and themes, put together in a narrative, don't constitute a plot. A plot requires causally-related events, and the plot summary I gave lists all the events that propel the story forward. There are other scenes that give more meaning to the film -- the daily life of the monkeys, the astronaut playing chess with HAL, or the scientist phoning his daughter from the orbital station. These all have their importance in the film, but they don't contribute to the central plot, because they lack causality.

The complexities of 2001 are not from its plot, but from the underlying ideas at work. The plot is simple, the difficult part is extrapolating the meaning from the events shown.

You might want to google up a few definitions of plot in fiction. If you can find one that corresponds to your own definition more than mine, I'd be willing to read it and respond. For now, though, here's the most readily available adequate definition I can find:

Plot is the structure of events within a story and the causal relationship between them. There is no plot without causality.

2001 does indeed have a complex plot -- which is why most people don't get it. They get hung up on the bits of story, never puting them together to understand the central ideas and themes.

I agree with the second sentence here but not the first. See above.

Of your last two paragraphs above, the second is one of the main reasons I disagree with the first, actually. Politicians love to throw numbers around when neither they nor the voters have any idea what those numbers actually mean. It takes a fair amount of math education to understand whether it's bullshit or not.

Oh, well. This is getting a bit long-winded, isn't it? You've inspired me to write an essay, which I'll probably be posting on my Web site sometime in the next few days. Check here this weekend, say, if you're interested.

Of your last two paragraphs above, the second is one of the main reasons I disagree with the first, actually. Politicians love to throw numbers around when neither they nor the voters have any idea what those numbers actually mean. It takes a fair amount of math education to understand whether it's bullshit or not.

Oh, well. This is getting a bit long-winded, isn't it? You've inspired me to write an essay, which I'll probably be posting on my Web site sometime in the next few days. Check here this weekend, say, if you're interested.

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?"

Without pressure the oxygen in the air will not diffuse into your blood stream. This is worse than simply holding your breath because oxygen uptake stops immediately; when you hold your breath there is still pressure and air in your lungs. The air pressure on Mars is so close to zero that for the purposes of human respiration it does not matter. You are essentially in vacuum and you'll have about 10 seconds to git right with Gawd before you black out.

Anyone who knee-jerks a reaction like that is clearly too judgemental and ego-centric for any opinion of theirs to be worth a damn. That's why I'm not going to waste any time trying to reasonably argue my position; you're clearly not interested in being reasonable. Such discussion would obviously be wasted on you.

"I was dumbfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it to my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous yellow binding as I would at a snake."

A mention of prior art in balooning the other planets would be in order. Many people arent aware of the fact that Russian Venera program, what later become Vega, successfully flew two balloons in Venusian atmosphere in 1984.
Geoffrey Landis has a couple very thought-provoking papers on his website, regarding possible further developments of atmospheric flight on both mars and venus, and possibilities for human living in upper atmosphere ....

Not sure, but I thought that the bends *was* termed "explosive decompression", because the nitrogen bubbles explode outward. But I could be wrong.

I guess there's a reasonably good analysis here.

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.

Also try C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born and The Madness Season.

Here's where you get a Sandman story ( or rather, a story about one of the Endless, Delirium)
This is the book that has Sandman stories by other authors like Barbra Hambly, Tad Williams and Colin Greenland.
Er, I hate being labelled an anonymous coward. I think I better sign in.

It seems that AC Clark got things about right in "2001" when Dave Bowman goes from the pod into the emergency airlock the hard way. You can read more about it here.

Here's a better link

Terry Bisson has already explored this area with a funny bit of short fiction.

As for Point Two ... unless 1) somebody posts detailed plot, story, or character information here, 2) you are dumb enough to include it in your book, and 3) your book is lucky enough to make it into print after you include unsolicited fan fiction in it, you should be fine. The SF writing community trades research all the time; you can see it in action over on the SFF.net or Speculations research topics.

A Rebuttal by Geoffery Landis.

Charles Sheffield's Web Between the Worlds deals with not only Elevators, but Slings as well.

In Joe Haldeman's forever war the soldiers are told that their suits are powered by a fist sized lump of plutonium. This is fine. It's small, relatively light and will keep running longer than they will live.

One soldier is killed, and their Squad leader radios the news up to the command ship. Command ship radios back to leave the body and proceed as planned. When they get about 30 miles from the body, a sudden shock startles them and they turn around to see a mushroom shaped puff of smoke beginning its ascent to the sky.

Speculations has a ton of good advice, and don't miss The Rumor Mill, especially the Caveat Scrivener sections.

SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. If you know anybody in SFWA, ask to look in the back of the directory at the list of agents representing members.

SFF.net, which hosts most of SFWA's online conversation in newsgroups.

Preditors & Editors is another outstanding resource; if you have any doubts about whether your agent, editor, or publisher is on the level or not, go poke around there.

It appears that Venus offers the most Earth-like environment in the entire solar system - not on the ground, but 50 km up in the clouds.

Take a look at Colonization of Venus by Geoffrey Landis.

As much as I agree that Gattaca is one of the best movies discussing this topic, one of the best novel series on this issue is Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain series. Personally, I think not having to sleep would be the coolest...BCNU//jle

lets come up with an economy and lifestyle where we get a nice eight-hour sleep at night. I like sleeping. No more sleep, so that my employer can enjoy my improved productivity? This is progress?

The Beggars series, by Nancy Kress, deals with a future when some humans are engineered to not require sleep. They use the extra time to study, accumluate power and riches. They are actually over ordinary humans. Then the question comes, do the sleepless owe something to the sleepy. What happens when supersleepless people are engineered?

Heh. I actually know the difference between von Neumann and Harvard architectures, but I still made this mistake for a few seconds. I guess it's because I read "too much" science fiction, and the concept of vN-machines occurs from time to time. They're good as a sort of "final nemesis" very-bad-concept, and the construction of such machines is often outlawed in whatever social system is being described. Just last week, I read The Wellstone by Wil McCarthy, which mentioned von Neumann machines. :)

There is a book about that.

And of course, by asking "would it be acceptable", you've begged the question of "would we even want to erase the original?" And there's a book on that too. (And even a more recent one)

However, those are traditional "hard SF dilemmas", and there hasn't been any technological change in the past 2 decades to make them any more pressing.

I did my own this animation of the shuttle sensor data found on the NASA page here. I have a /. journal entry for it here.

My, admittedly amateur, conclusion is that one of the carbon shields located on the front of the wing (right ahead of the wheel well) failed for some reason. Check out the animation page to see why I say this.

...is pure gold. He's primarily a fantasty writer but he's done some science fiction as well. Check out his excellent page at The Misenchanted Page.

Ferretman

Thanks for the reminder! Also worth mentioning...I found his website, and was pleased to see he's got an online subscription service running for new DragonRealm material. For those in the know about Dragonrealm, he hints that Shade might be making a comeback...

For Poul Anderson, check out his "Time Patrol" series and "Boat of a Million Years".

For Charles Sheffield, his "Proteus" series is a definite must.

PJF: "Riverworld" series.

Resnick: "Widomaker" series.

I think it would be cool to have a spin-off about a *Klingon* ship on it's adventures through space.

In Terry Bisson's own words:

Would you talk a bit about your development of Lifestreams, your candidate for a new information-control interface? How does elegance figure into it?

Originated in my unhappiness, bordering on disgust, with every operating system on the market, the Mac desktop was revolutionary in the 1970's, and was beautiful in the early 1980's, but in the late 1980's, it was getting old, and today it's pathetically obsolete, whether you buy it from Mac or in the form of Windows. After all, it comes out from an obsolete, long ago, technology era that doesn't match today's computing environment at all. Matches it so badly that it's an intolerable pain to deal with. So that for example, the system was designed when the Internet was not the internet, email was unimportant, very few people used it at all, computing cycles were scarce & expensive, memory was expensive, and just as important, or more important, all computer users were new users. So in the 1980's, people didn't have many files, many directories, because they hadn't been online for very long. But today, when compute cycles and memories are cheap, and the problem isn't how to conserve those resources, but how to squander them reasonably, and the internet is bigger than ever. So many people use their computers as text managers exclusively. The operating system designed long ago for radically different computers doesn't work anymore. For that matter, the whole underlying thesis of an operating system is obsolete. There is absolutely no reason that I should ever have to think about where I have a file, what machine I'm on, what my files are named, what directory I stuck something in. What I want is to be able to walk up to a computer anywhere, and tune in my electronic life. I don't care if it's a Mac or PC just as I don't care if, when I tune in CNN on TV, I don't care if it's a Toshiba TV or a Hitachi TV. In short, for all these reasons I've sort of hinted at, I found myself so disgusted with what was available, I figured there had to be something better. Although the research I had been doing on software in the 80's was fairly esoteric stuff having to do with programming & distributed systems and artificial intelligence, I had to turn my attention to everyday computing needs because the situation was, in software terms, so incredibly awful.

Wow, you weren't full of shit for a whole two and a half paragraphs. Keep trying, little scamper, you'll get it all, someday.

Sheffield had three wives, four children, and was a physicist before he started writing. His first wife actually died of cancer. His widow is Nancy Kress, also a well known author of science fiction who has won more awards than he has.

You may take a gander at this short autobiography.

How different do you think the air pressure is at, say, 40,000 feet and on the moon?

Air pressure at 40,000 feet is about 2.7 psi, or about 1/6th of one atmosphere. That's not nearly enough to live on-- you can't transport oxygen to your brain fast enough at that pressure-- but it's survivable with an oxygen mask. The near-total vacuum on the surface of the moon is definitely not survivable. Your tissues would expand dramatically due to the pressure difference-- no, you wouldn't explode-- and your blood pressure would drop to zero. There would basically be no circulation of blood in your body. Oxygen or no, you'd be unconscious in seconds, and dead in a minute or two.

So the difference between 40,000 feet and the moon is extreme and significant. I don't think "not much" is an accurate description.

Do you need a pressure suit if the outside pressure increases by 1 atmosphere?

Going from one atmosphere to two, or from one to one-half, is not difficult. Going from one-half atmosphere to virtually zero is very hard, however.

But losing 1 atmosphere will not make your blood boil and your eyes pop out of your head. And you won't explode.

Actually, the free liquid on the surface of your body-- your eyes, and in your mouth and nose-- will boil. In 1966, a technician at NASA was exposed to a low-pressure environment of less than 1 psi. He survived, but he reported that the last thing he remembered was his saliva starting to boil.

Also, in experiments on animals, water vapor does form in the tissues an in the blood vessels and third spaces, although you wouldn't call it boiling per se. The bodies of the animals swelled rapidly to up to twice their normal volume when exposed-- slowly, under controlled depressurization-- to vacuum. They didn't explode, but they died ugly.

(More fun facts here.)

The human body is tougher than you give it credit for being. There have been many cases of humans surviving brief exposure to very low pressure environments. A good example is described here. The subject survived 30 seconds of very low pressure with no long-term ill effects. He did not "blow up."

Of course, he would have died in minutes if they hadn't pressurized the chamber, but that's not exactly the same thing.

It seems to me that the toughest thing facing an author today is an industry that's going to ask for one compromise after another

That's crap. Good editors -- and there are plenty of them out there -- are a writer's best friend, where the quality of the work is concerned. (They may not be where the money's concerned, but that's why you have an agent. Which you don't need until you already have an unsigned contract in your hand, by the way.)

The toughest thing facing an aspiring author today is getting the damn book written. (All of you would-be writers in this forum wondering if Xlibris would be the way to go if, as, and when you get around to writing that book are putting the cart before the horse.)

The second toughest thing is writing a good book. Interestingly, probably 95% of the aspiring writers and up-and-coming writers I've met fall into one of two categories: Either they write really well but don't get much done, or they already have two manuscript the size of phone books that they're trying to get published, and they're crap. (The other 5% are Tim Pratt, who doesn't seem to have either problem.)

Writers of the first sort have trouble because their drive for quality makes them spend more time on their stuff, more time revising, and even yet still more time throwing it out and starting over. ("Writer's block isn't not being able to write. It's thinking that everything you write is shit." -- Maureen McHugh)

Writers of the second sort have trouble because they don't understand why they can't sell their stuff, and so they blame the editors, the publishers, the slush pile readers and the reading public, instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on themselves, for not working to improve their writing.

(P.S. Yes, IAAPW. Barely. But ask one who's been around a while. You'll get the same answer.)

It seems to me that the toughest thing facing an author today is an industry that's going to ask for one compromise after another

That's crap. Good editors -- and there are plenty of them out there -- are a writer's best friend, where the quality of the work is concerned. (They may not be where the money's concerned, but that's why you have an agent. Which you don't need until you already have an unsigned contract in your hand, by the way.)

The toughest thing facing an aspiring author today is getting the damn book written. (All of you would-be writers in this forum wondering if Xlibris would be the way to go if, as, and when you get around to writing that book are putting the cart before the horse.)

The second toughest thing is writing a good book. Interestingly, probably 95% of the aspiring writers and up-and-coming writers I've met fall into one of two categories: Either they write really well but don't get much done, or they already have two manuscript the size of phone books that they're trying to get published, and they're crap. (The other 5% are Tim Pratt, who doesn't seem to have either problem.)

Writers of the first sort have trouble because their drive for quality makes them spend more time on their stuff, more time revising, and even yet still more time throwing it out and starting over. ("Writer's block isn't not being able to write. It's thinking that everything you write is shit." -- Maureen McHugh)

Writers of the second sort have trouble because they don't understand why they can't sell their stuff, and so they blame the editors, the publishers, the slush pile readers and the reading public, instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on themselves, for not working to improve their writing.

(P.S. Yes, IAAPW. Barely. But ask one who's been around a while. You'll get the same answer.)

I did a little digging into what would be needed to get one's works published.

Seriously. It's not rocket science. There is no conspiracy. Publishers are always looking for good new writers. You don't need an agent (until you have a contract in hand), you don't need an editor or a book doctor or a ghost writer, you don't need to self-publish. (In fact, self-publishing can hurt your chances of having a commercial career as a writer.) You just need to write well.

This is a good thing, because it's the only part of the process that's under your control.

The publishing industry is not the music industry. By and large, writers do get paid.

If you're serious about writing and you want to write science fiction or fantasy, I highly recommend applying to one of the major SF/F writing workshops -- Clarion, Clarion West, Viable Paradise, Odyssey. You'll have a chance to improve your writing, make friends and contacts, and get the straight dope on the industry from working professionals.

Last, any aspiring writer should keep in mind Yog's Law: Money Flows Toward The Writer. If you see an "opportunity" that violates that law, you should look at it with extreme skepticism.

I did a little digging into what would be needed to get one's works published.

Seriously. It's not rocket science. There is no conspiracy. Publishers are always looking for good new writers. You don't need an agent (until you have a contract in hand), you don't need an editor or a book doctor or a ghost writer, you don't need to self-publish. (In fact, self-publishing can hurt your chances of having a commercial career as a writer.) You just need to write well.

This is a good thing, because it's the only part of the process that's under your control.

The publishing industry is not the music industry. By and large, writers do get paid.

If you're serious about writing and you want to write science fiction or fantasy, I highly recommend applying to one of the major SF/F writing workshops -- Clarion, Clarion West, Viable Paradise, Odyssey. You'll have a chance to improve your writing, make friends and contacts, and get the straight dope on the industry from working professionals.

Last, any aspiring writer should keep in mind Yog's Law: Money Flows Toward The Writer. If you see an "opportunity" that violates that law, you should look at it with extreme skepticism.

The quick answers to these questions are: Clarke got it about right in 2001. You would survive about a ninety seconds, you wouldn't explode, you would remain conscious for about ten seconds.

Nope.

Hmmm... I don't know how to show you my user info. When you click on someone else's user number it doesn't show the karma. I will try to cut and paste from what it shows me. Hopefully you will believe I didn't fake it...

This is your User Info page. There are thousands more, but this one is yours. You most likely are not so interested in yourself, and probably would be more interested in the Preferences links you see up top there, where you can customize Slashdot, change your password, or just click pretty widgets to kill time.

You're a moderator with 5 points(expire after 2002-06-02). Please read the Moderator Guidelines before you do any moderation.

http://www.sff.net/people/jackb/home.htp
jackb@sff.net

Jack William Bell has posted 137 comments. Below find the most recent 24 comments.

1 Re:Default namespaces are evil! posted on 01:57 PM May 30th, 2002 (Score:2)
attached to XML Namespaces and How They Affect XPath and XSLT

And egads! That excerpt!

Unease prickled Kamoj. She treaded water, her hair floating in swirls around her body, wrapping her slender waist and then letting go. Her reflection showed a young woman with black curls framing a heart-shaped face. She had dark eyes, as did most people in Argali, though hers were larger than usual, with long lashes that at the moment sparkled with drops of water.

Ugh! Augh! This stuff won an award? It's so bad it makes me wince.

I couldn't have done worse if I had made a special effort to be cliche. Describing someone with a reflection? "Heart-shaped face?" And that "at the moment," as though intentionally placed to break rhythm. I hadn't realized the Nebula people were so tasteless.

Sometimes, when someone is recommending a book to me, I'll ask, "Does it have trees, grass and (egad) flowers on the cover?"

Call it a stupid prejudice but if ever there was cover art that would turn me away, Quantum Rose has it.

When I'm looking at it, I'm thinking Nora Roberts crossed Gone With the Wind and the Lord of the Rings?

My eyes!!! My eyes!!!

Hm, not an exact match for what you want, but still: try "The Collapsium" by Wil McCarthy if you haven't read it. It's a bit silly, too, in places, but not when it comes to the core ideas (programmable matter, matter made out of tiny black holes, and stuff). I enjoyed it.

BTW, Haldeman used to teach a science fiction class at M.I.T., and for all I know he still does.

Lucy has great stories about Haldeman...he got shot in the ass by some gangbanger a few years back(just some random violence) and got rushed to the hospital. When the doctor X-rayed him, the bullet fragments were so indistinguishable from the rest of the chunks of metal in him -- relics of his Vietnam tours of duty -- that the doc said, "What's one more stripe on a tiger?" and sent him home.

BTW, Haldeman used to teach a science fiction class at M.I.T., and for all I know he still does.

Lucy has great stories about Haldeman...he got shot in the ass by some gangbanger a few years back(just some random violence) and got rushed to the hospital. When the doctor X-rayed him, the bullet fragments were so indistinguishable from the rest of the chunks of metal in him -- relics of his Vietnam tours of duty -- that the doc said, "What's one more stripe on a tiger?" and sent him home.