blacksundae

Halfway through an exchange of emails with the science fiction writer Charles Stross - a virtual meeting in cyberspace which might have had something of the exotic as little as five years ago - it strikes me that our text-based communication feels almost archaic now.

It’s a realisation that might have come straight from the pages of one of Stross’s novels. These days, email tennis feels almost boringly routine, and the rapid normalisation of the technologies which are changing people’s lives is a recurrent theme in his fiction. Despite their hard-edged technological focus, Stross’s worlds are often as quotidian as they are fantastic.

Link! The only novel of Stross’ I’ve read is Accelerando, but it was fantastic. Via Reddit.

SEVERAL years ago, I built a robot whose sole purpose in life was to create an even smaller robot just like himself… So much like himself, that this robot endeavoured to create yet another tiny robot, ad infinitum. This continued for a while until an extremely tiny speck of robot tried to endow purpose upon a cloud of molecules with ruinous result.

Link!

I was thinking about putting together a photo retrospective of Stan Winston’s work, but the folks over at io9 beat me to it. Bathe in the geeky goodness.

Here’s to ya, Mr. Winston