Arc's editor Simon Ings wonders why there wasn't more dancing. The meetngreet staff at NESTA, the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, have a lot invested in the idea that...| Tumblr
Steven Zorn set out to create software that addressed timeless human desires. What could possibly go wrong? "I am telling this story backwards, which is perhaps fitting for a story of inside-out...| Tumblr
How far will we go to protect animals from suffering - and how will those decisions shape our future? Arc partnered with The Institute of Art and Ideas (@IAI_TV) for this discussion, featuring Greenpeace’s UK executive director John Sauven, bioethicist Sarah Chan and novelist and broadcaster Marcel Theroux.| Arcfinity
Miranda Sherry does the Monster Mash. Arrow, PPB 38.99 What do a Boer trekker girl, a serial killer, and a giant mechanical octopus have in common? Well nothing, obviously. However, in his debut novel, Apocalypse Now Now, Charlie Human deftly convinces us that they’re part of an intricate plot to bring about the end of the world. His concise, unfussy writing style, riotous dialogue and sharply drawn characters ensure that, however implausible, you’re only too happy to go along for the rid...| Arcfinity
Joe Vaz feels invaded Orbit, PPB £8.99 You have no idea what to make of this. You meet Lieutenant “Lucky” Quinto as he leads a platoon to uncover a cache of military weapons hidden ages ago beneath the ground in an abandoned mine. It seems as though you’re reading a piece of military SF. You’re in Starship Troopers territory, or that’s what you assume: army guys battle aliens. Except that a few pages later you realise that Quinto’s platoon is lacking in true soldiers. The war has...| Arcfinity
What’s the good of virtue, asks Nan Craig The Borough Press, £16.99 No harm can come to a good man, said Aristotle, and the hero of James Smythe’s latest novel, Lawrence Walker, is a Good Man. So say (repeatedly) his family, his campaign manager, the people in the small town where he lives and the people he represents as a Senator. So when a video prediction of his chances as a Presidential candidate appears to show him threatening his terrified family, it’s something of a surprise to ...| Arcfinity
Christopher Priest contemplates acts of violence. Gollancz, PPB £14.99 There’s a general principle of book reviewing, set out originally by, I believe, Cyril Connolly. He advised reviewers that they should write for the reader when reviewing a book they like, but if they dislike it they should address the author instead. This creates a distinction between a public recommendation, which pleases the author and possibly makes readers interested, and a more personal discourse intended for the ...| Arcfinity
No amount of literary motley can save a bad premise, says Nina Allan Harper Voyager, HB £12.99 Noria Kaitio lives in a small village in the north of what has become known as the Scandinavian Union. Her story takes place several centuries in our future, at a time where global warming has melted the polar ice caps and the world’s political and environmental geography has been permanently and dramatically altered as a result. Fresh water is a precious commodity, and strictly rationed. Noria...| Arcfinity
Tim Maughan takes a bus into the Cloud. Spread over two days in April at Princeton’s School of Architecture, Data Drama was the latest attempt to try and capture the post-Snowden, paranoia-infested, panic-overloaded, drone-struck global Zeitgeist - if such a thing even exists. Which academic disciplines are most applicable for trying to fathom where our collective networked neurosis is leading us? Data Drama’s curator Liam Young, known for his work at Princeton and London’s Architecture...| Arcfinity
She’s the new Stephen King - but you might not find her in airports. Joe Vaz brings Sarah Lotz’s eerie new blockbuster in to land. Hodder & Stoughton, HB £14.99 I first became interested in South Africa’s genre fiction scene when I started Something Wicked, a magazine for SF and horror short stories, in July 2006. To grow interest in the magazine, we launched with a competition. One of the entries we received came from an unknown author named Sarah Lotz; her story, “The Perfect Man...| Arcfinity
but as Tim Maughan discovers, this is easier said than done. One thing every sane, sensible science fiction writer swears they’ll never do is try and accurately predict the future. It’s an especially unwise idea if you work on short, near-future timescales. Most likely you’re going to get it wrong, and your work is going to look dated and naive. Worse, you might actually get it right - but way too early, making your work look conservative, your predictions blunted by a cowardly imaginat...| Arcfinity
From Alphaville to Robocop, science fiction has the measure of smart cities, says Tim Maughan. In a recent article on the continuing civil unrest in Turkey, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the science fiction metaphors the media so frequently turn to are outdated. “Nineteen Eighty-Four had finally arrived, it was said - just off by 30 years or so. But this is the wrong way to understand what’s happening,” she argues. “Deep and pervasive surveillance is real. It is likely worse ...| Arcfinity
Keith Brooke explores a fractured fictional future Solaris, PPB £7.99 At some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future, for the random mix of reasons that all too often drive history, Europe is fragmenting into progressively smaller national entities – or polities, as Hutchinson labels them in Europe in Autumn. Nations are breaking up into their constituent regions; these regions are splitting into cities and neighbourhoods are declaring their own sovereignty. In this future, even a ...| Arcfinity
Writer and game designer Robert Morgan explores an exhibition that time forgot Image: Jamie Hewlett, 2014. Comics Unmasked continues until 19 August You’re greeted by two hooded figures, faces hidden behind Guy Fawkes masks, at the entrance to the British Library’s new exhibition of mainstream and underground British comics. It’s a stark contrast to the huge Jamie Hewlett splash page proudly hung on the outside of the library building, with its grungy superhero, her mask off, sipping...| Arcfinity
Becky Hogge is afforded a medieval vision of the future. Jeremy Rifkin at the RSA, London, 29 April 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin is published by Palgrave MacMillan, HB £16.99 The trick to reading Jeremy Rifkin’s latest work is to treat it less like a book and more like a mystical text. That’s because Rifkin, a prolific writer and the management guru most likely to be found at an Occupy sit-in, has synthesised so many ideas within it that laboring over the contrad...| Arcfinity
Claire Dean returns from an exhibition exploring science fiction’s dark side… or does she? Sascha Pohflepp’s installation Camera Futura. Science Fiction: New Death continues at FACT, Liverpool until 22 June. I was convinced that if I stood still for long enough it would get bored and move on. The knocking unnerved me. I couldn’t work out how many of them there were. The wall trembled. Every time I anticipated a pattern, it changed. Through already punctured peepholes I could see red ...| Arcfinity
There are fifteen dead people for every person living. What if we unburied them? “I keep getting flashbacks to provincial streets. You’re driving. We’re touring the big civil engineering projects, looking for dead royals. We found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier for all the world as if he’d been garotted on the lavatory. Yesterday it was a previously unknown illegitimate Stuart, two metres under the floor of an HS2 station wit...| Arcfinity
The writing is (almost) on the wall in Tim’s new story Ghost Hardware “Anika starts with broad brushstrokes. A swipe of her hand is enough to brush away the initial debris on the face of the billboard, the hastily scrawled felt-tip pen tags and random stickers, cartoon monkey faces and ironically pixelised icons, until the surface is clean, nothing interfering with the now pristine Volkswagen advert that fills the huge twenty-by-ten-inch space. She pauses for a second, not knowing where n...| Arcfinity
It’s the end of the world as we know it - but no one. it seems, has told Al Gore. “Politics has futurism coiled within its rhetoric – the politician generally promises a better, brighter future, so long as you vote for him or her. It is rare that a politician will say, ‘Don’t bother to vote, it’s all doomed, just go home and wait for the end.’ Yet a politician can sometimes afford to be a qualified eschatologist, and such optimistic pessimism can even take them a long way – as...| Arcfinity
If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn’t that actually make life better? “The initial impetus for SO was an attempt to alleviate the unsustainable pressures exerted by an ageing population. Soon after the SO implementation, however, other major benefits emerged. By contrast, none of the potential problems predicted by critics of the scheme has materialised. There were very few cases of SO participants changing their mind. Although (or perhaps because) such cases received wide publ...| Arcfinity
