SF author Bruce Sterling on The Singularity. Listen up.

Over at SPIKED you can read review of a perhaps-tedious but interesting-sounding book of bollocks-bashing: A brief history of bollocks. It looks to be the sort of thing I’d write if I were a grumpy Brit man in late middle age. And I didn’t know that damnable creationism was such a problem in Britain. I thought it was only the waterheads of America who believed in that trash. Ah well…

Here’s a book review of a book that looks pretty interesting: Fallen Order by Karen Liebreich. Pope John Paul II has kept noticeably quiet on the subject of Catholic priests who sexually abuse children. But in 2002, after high-profile cases in Europe and the United States, he was moved to acknowledge the problem – briefly. Paragraph 38 of his annual Holy Thursday letter alluded to priests who succumb to “the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mystery of evil] at work in the world”. Such behaviour puts other priests in a bad light, said the Pope, without mentioning what …

You gotta find someone who says something like the following interesting: I find almost every novel overwritten and padded. I mean, almost every novel over three-hundred pages, I find, I would have edited—a little bit. I don’t like artificial devices pulling you through [novels] like a dead body on the first page… and hit hasn’t changed much from the nineteenth-century, when you’ve got just about something like a dead body on the first page of every bestseller you’ve got… or a dead body with no face, or a nun! I get tired of what sells, that way. I’m not interested …

I just finished reading Schild’s Ladder, by Greg Egan. What a wonderful, strange novel. It’s philosophical, inventive beyond anything I’ve read in years, and powerful, as well as stuffed full not only of enough advanced science to make my head hurt, but also characters so interesting, believable, and engaging that I savoured every minute I spent reading the book… though, for the sake of my poor brain I had to put it down rather often. It’s a wonderful book full of so many cool science-fictional ideas, and it goes so far beyond space opera that I think it warrants a …

The things some people learn reading Lord of the Rings amazes me. For example, I learned a lot about politics in “naive” localities like Hobbiton—and I do wish they’d included that long epilogue in the film, though I knew they wouldn’t—and the tale of Frodo leaving the world he knew on his quest comforted me, as I read it on the plane over the first time I came to Korea. But what others come up with surprises me even more! For example, someone’s presented an article where, rather convincingly, you can see the book as a dating manual. Ah, book …

Another Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries piece… This one I found rather moving: Jongno. This, I have a feeling, I actually get. And yeah, for lack of an appropriate category, this is gonna go under “lit” in my archives.

A pretty good SF columnist here, by the name of Julia Houston. :) I’m posting this more as a reminder to myself to go back and read her stuff, mind, as I’ve only read one piece by her… :) Still working on getting pics uploaded, and a continuing summary of my trip here. It’s coming!