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LifeloggingI am Apollo Lemmon and this is my lifestream. I invite you to join me in my exploration of an integral life. I am focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness and I explore spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life. I am now living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I can always be reached at apollo@apollolemmon.com
Lately you may have noticed that hard SF is starting to break the rules. Writer Jason Sanford identifies this as the emerging "SciFi Strange" subgenre, and he's curated a list of free stories online that make SF a lot stranger.
Sanford says SciFi Strange reflects a multicultural world where tradition co-exists with multiple, minority perspectives on reality. He continues:
SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically—and therefore realistically—possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today. But don't call SciFi Strange fantasy. This is pure science fiction. It's merely an updated version of the literature of ideas. A science fiction for a world where the frontiers of scientific possibility are almost philosophical in nature.
The ostinatos are more ominous. The slow chords hang in the air like wraiths. The one which sounds coolest, to my ears, is the Babylon 5 theme, which is just majestic and echoes through your mind with the thought of our last, best hope for peace. But the Doctor Who theme sounds like alien monks chanting their slow Gregorian observations — plus you can totally hear how Delia Derbyshire made one of the earliest pieces of electronic music by pasting together bits of tape by hand.
The Transcendent City is a gorgeous short film by Bartlett School of Architecture graduate Richard Hardy about an artificial intelligence network that coexists with its ecosystem. It's a welcome break from the presupposition that AI overlords would scorch the Earth.
In this film, machines are able to do what us meatbags can't — achieve perfect equilibrium with the environment.
"I'm a Zen Buddhist if I would describe myself," he says. "I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down."
...
"The guy keeps writing about Jesus, but he doesn't consider himself a Christian," Weller says.
"He says faith is necessary but that we should accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything."
Science fiction's full of wishful thinking about artificial intelligence: It'll spring up on its own. It'll become smarter than us in no time. Ted Chiang's new novella, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, will change how you think about A.I.
Spoilers ahead! Although I'll try to avoid giving away anything major.
And not only that, but Chiang's longest work to date is pure idea crack. Writing a longer work doesn't make the award-winning short-story writer spread out his legendary inventiveness and gift for challenging the reader — if anything, he goes into overdrive. The Life Cycle of Software Objects keeps surprising you. Not just in the sense that you think the story's going one direction, and then it suddenly veers in a new, totally logical, direction. But also in the sense that the story isn't really about what you think it's about. New ideas, new ways of looking at the conundrum of artificial intelligence, keep coming up, although they feel as though they're organic to the story and the characters.
Anybody interested in artificial intelligence must read Chiang's novella — but the same goes for anybody who cares about science fiction and wants to see it done well.
Great science fiction and fantasy novels don't just expose us to other worlds and alternate timelines — they expand our minds and give us compass to steer by. Here are our favorite bits of advice and maxims from SF books.
You could do a lot worse than living your life according to principles espoused in science fiction books — in fact, here's somebody who claims that it's impossible to live a moral life unless you read science fiction. We won't go quite that far, but here are some words to live by from science fiction. Please do post your own favorite maxims and aphorisms from SF in the comments — I have a feeling it'll be a really amazing comment thread!
She's deep into futurist Ray Kurzweil and loves Octavia Butler's writing. But her science fiction stories play out over itchy beats, under a James Brown cape. io9 interviews the unclassifiable musician about her influences and dreams for the future.
Janelle Monae has gotten attention for being the rare mainstream artist who is clearly doing her own thing, drawing from influences as diverse as James Brown, psychedelia, punk, and Disney's Fantasia. Her albums tell the epic story of Cindy Mayweather, the Alpha Platinum 9000, a droid optimized for rock performance, often cloned but never equaled. Cindy is on the run, having fallen in love with the human millionaire Anthony Greendown – a pairing which, in Metropolis, is against the law.