I came across this today: Jedi Knight Training Event in Belfast!

A part of me really wants to go to this, just to see what it’s all about…. But another part of me - the part called reason - thinks it’s all a gimmicky scam.

“Rory, creative thinking expert and creator of Rory’s Story Cubes, will join me to offer Northern Ireland’s most exciting/only Jedi training event of 2009. Rory and I will explain the famous Jedi Mind-Trick by showing how to gain control over and from the minds of others. Rory will explore the subjects of Energy Psychology and Subtle Energy fields to gain modern insight in the mystical Force. I will then walk participants through the films to see those psychological skills Luke Skywalker gained in becoming a Jedi, and those Anakin lacked in his fall to the dark side.”

I wonder what the practical applications are in modern life. “These are not the tax return forms you are looking for….”

Update: Allen Baird, one of the event’s organisers, has responded in the comments. Be sure to read it, he makes a good point.

Today it’s exactly 10 years since The Matrix premiered. This cinematographic amalgam of pop-culture and sci-fi influences is arguably the most important movie of the first decade of the 21st century. The impact this film has had on modern culture is difficult to overestimate. So let’s give a big Happy Birthday to Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and Agent Smith.

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”

Many of this year’s Hugo Award nominees have opted to publish their stories for free online, usually under Creative Commons licenses. I think this is a spectacularly good idea, as it gives us fans more opportunities to partake of these literary gems.

Here’s one such a gem: Evil Robot Monkey. It’s short, but its emotional impact on me was significant. An excerpt:

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

(Via Boing Boing)

Cory Doctorow and Ben Rosenbaum have co-written a novella for inclusion in the Fast Forward 2 SF anthology. This novella, called True Names, has now been released independently as a freely downloadable Creative Commons licensed work.

It’s a fantastic piece of speculative fiction, revolving around the struggles of sentient programs running on galaxy-devouring self-replicating nanomachine-computronium. It contains Matrix-esque mindbends of simulations-within-simulations and ends with a mightily satisfying twist.

If you’re at all into post-Singularity sci-fi, this story is highly recommended. The PDF of this awesome novella can be downloaded here.

(Via Boing Boing)

Kevin Kelly has written an exceedingly interesting essay about the emergence of a global internet intelligence which he calls the One Machine. It’s a long read but definitely worthwhile if you’re at all fascinated by the idea of Gibson-esque emergent AI’s:

This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest possible inclusion of communicating chips. It is a vast machine of extraordinary dimensions. It is comprised of quadrillion chips, and consumes 5% of the planet’s electricity. It is not owned by any one corporation or nation (yet), nor is it really governed by humans at all. Several corporations run the larger sub clouds, and one of them, Google, dominates the user interface to the One Machine at the moment.

A recent Boston Globe article sheds some interesting light on the question of extraterrestrial life. Regardless of some flawed assumptions the author makes in the course of coming to his point, he poses a theory worth contemplating. Are we as a self-aware, sentient lifeforms an exception in the universe, or a commonplace occurrence? If life is ubiquitous, why haven’t we heard from any other advanced civilization yet? The article’s author explains this with what he calls the Great Filter - an obstacle or inevitable event that prevents the evolution of life to complete the path to advanced space-faring civilization.

Personally I think there is other intelligent life out there, and the sole reason we haven’t heard from them yet is that we’ve been listening the wrong way. Radio may seem like a logical way to propagate signals, but already we have begun radiating less and less radio signals into space as we’re switching to a digital communications network. If there are advanced extraterrestrials out there, my guess is they’re waiting for us to reach a certain threshold of technological development, one that allows us to communicate with them with compatible technologies.

Or there is a Great Filter and we’re likely doomed to go extinct. Oops.

The folks at German design bureau Blutsbrüder have come up with a supercool series of photo/CGI composite images featuring all kinds of future-tech gadgets and contrivances. Definitely worth checking out if you’re into that sort of thing. I sure am.

(Via Gizmodo)

Sometimes you read a book and when you finish it you wish it hadn’t ended, and you want to live in that world so you could meet the people in it.

Richard Kadrey’s Butcher Bird is one of those books for me. It probably won’t tickle the fancy of most people, but for me its blend of religion-inspired fantasy, roller-coaster action and reluctantly romantic heroes pushes all the right buttons.

And it’s a free download. Doesn’t get much better than that.

I never knew that professional authors also wrote fan fiction. Steven Brust, whose novel To Reign In Hell is one of my personal favorites, has written a full-length Firefly fanfic novel. Can’t wait to read it.

I wonder if there are any copyright issues at stake here. Amateur fan fiction is one thing, but one might argue a professional author can use fan fiction to draw attention to his other works and thus generate revenue for himself.

Having recently begun delving into science fiction books again, I’ve noticed how much crap is out there. Many recent SF novels are poorly written, with multitudes of flaws. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if these books weren’t heralded as the new pinnacles of hard Sci-Fi.

Novels from the likes of Charles Stross, Alistair Reynolds and Neal Asher receive raving reviews all around, but to me they aren’t all that good. Certainly not on par with the works of Iain M. Banks and Dan Simmons. And then genuine little gems like Blindsight and Altered Carbon seem to fall through the gaps, barely getting any attention while being vastly better, though admittedly still somewhat flawed.

It makes me realize all the more that truly good writers are exceedingly rare.