Best British SF Books, and Best Debut Fantasy Novel, Announced [Books]

via io9 by Charlie Jane Anders on 1/24/12

Congratulations to Genevieve Valentine, who won the 2012 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award for her novel Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. This award celebrates the best debut fantasy novel published in the previous year, and the runners up were Erin Morgenstern for The Night Circus, Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife, Stina Leicht for Of Blood and Honey, and Ransom Riggs for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

Meanwhile, the British Science Fiction Association announced the finalists for the British SF Awards, with China Miéville, Adam Roberts and Christopher Priest riding high once again. Also honored was newcomer Lavie Tidhar, with his alternate reality tale Osama. Here's the complete list, via the Guardian:

Best Novel

Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan)
The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)
By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Best Short Fiction

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)
The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov's, July)
Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley's own website)
Covehithe by China Miéville (The Guardian)
Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

Best Non-Fiction

Out of This World: Science Fiction but not as we Know it by Mike Ashley (British Library)
The SF Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls and David Langford (website)
Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions blog)
SF Mistressworks, ed. Ian Sales (website)
Pornokitsch, ed. Jared Shurin and Anne Perry (website)
The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction), ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw (Science Fiction Foundation)

Best Art

Cover of Ian Whates's The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)
Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls by Jim Kay (Walker)
Cover of Lavie Tidhar's Osama by Pedro Marques (PS Publishing)
Cover of Liz Williams's A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth (Newcon Press)

Forismatic Is a Free App that Helps You Relax and Keeps You Inspired Every Day [Mac Downloads]

via Lifehacker by Alan Henry on 1/17/12

Mac: Computers are supposed to make our work easier, but in reality they often just bring us more work and stress us out. Give your Mac the opportunity to help you relax for a change with Forismatic, a free app that sits in the menubar until you need a little inspiration to help you keep going, and will remind you to take a break now and again to relax.

Once installed, Forismatic lives in your menubar. Click it and select "Inspire Me" to dim your display and get a random quote or expression designed to lift your spirits. If you want another, you can refresh, and if you particularly like the quote, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter. If you want to take a break, just click "Relaxation Mode," and the app will disable your mouse, keyboard, and trackpad, and display some additional quotes to hep you recharge while a timer keeps track of how long your break has been.

Forismatic isn't the only menubar app designed to remind you to relax and step away from the computer every now and again. Previously mentioned CalmDown reminds you to take breaks by blanking out the screen, and also mentioned Coffee Break will darken your screen so you have a reason to get up and go get a cup of coffee or glass of water. The real difference is that Forismatic is completely free, and offers a little inspiration to help you get through the day as well. Plus, the app is completely free.

Forismatic

Notification Control Is a Launchpad for Cleaning Up Your Web Services' Email Notifications [Email]

via Lifehacker by Melanie Pinola on 1/17/12

When signing up for popular services like Twitter and YouTube, you may have allowed the default email notifications or selected some options and never went back to change them. If now you're getting more updates and notifications than you'd like, Notification Control can help you clean them all up quickly.

Like previously mentioned MyPermissions, Notification Control is just a starting page — a useful bookmark to popular webapps' email notifications settings pages. It doesn't access your account credentials at all, but rather just takes you where you need to go to manage things like what sort of updates you want to get via email from Facebook.

Services covered right now are: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Meetip, Dribbble, Ebay, and Forrst.

It takes just a minute to get your email notifications the way you want them. Add this along with the MyPermissions bookmarks page and you've got a web services cleanup launchpad, so to speak.

Notification Control

The Dark Knight Rises trailer, recut entirely with scenes from Batman: The Animated Series [Video]

via io9 by Meredith Woerner on 1/16/12

Inarguably one of the finest Batman narratives of all times, Batman: The Animated Series has been recut to fit Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises trailer. And lo! The whole thing fits like a glove.

[Via The Mary Sue]

You are bitching about the wrong things when you read an article about science [Rant]

via io9 by Annalee Newitz on 1/16/12

Science may be a source of fascinating, world-changing discoveries, but that doesn't stop people from bitching about it. Two of the most common complaints from the public about scientific work are actually complete misunderstandings of how science is done. The worst part is that these two complaints divert the public's attention away from two reasons they should be criticizing science articles but almost never do.

Don't Bitch Like This

Here is the number one complaint I've seen from readers of articles about science:

1. "Duh - that's obvious."

It's the kind of response that people have to studies about how alcohol leads to poor decision-making, and articles about how urban blight increases racial tensions (though in fact that study, which everybody thought was so obviously true, turned out to be based on falsified data).

This is in fact such a common complaint that the LA Times' Eryn Brown wrote an article last year explaining why science sometimes makes you say "duh." Her reasoning was that oftentimes things that seem obvious - such as the fact that smoking causes cancer - have met with incredible skepticism and required countless studies to pound the point home.

The other point that I would make is that a comment like "duh that's obvious" relies entirely on common sense and anecdotal knowledge. And the scientific method does not acknowledge either as a valid method of proving something about the world. That's why science has destroyed "common sense" ideas like the world being flat. It's why anecdotes about bright lights in the sky do not scientifically prove that fairies exist.

Science is designed to challenge our common sense assumptions about the world because they are often wrong. Sometimes, however, common sense turns out to be right. Which is why occasionally science seems to prove the obvious. But that's not science being useless - it's science doing what it does best, which is applying rigor and rationality to anecdote and dogma. So science has offered evidence that dogs pay attention when we talk to them. Seems like a "no, duh" right? Yes, but now we can prove that it's true, and not just some widely-held delusion based on YouTube videos.

So next time you want to say "no, duh" to a scientific finding, consider that there's a big difference between feeling like something is true and having evidence that it's true based on concerted study.

Here's the second wrong-headed complaint about science stories, which in many ways overlaps with the first:

2. "Nobody should be paid to study that."

You often hear this complaint about government-funded science - especially from politicians like Senator Tom Coburn, who suggested deep cuts in the National Science Foundation budget last year. But I also see it being brought up in the comments sections on science articles a lot, regardless of who funded the study. Usually it's when we've got a "no duh" study, but sometimes it's when the subject at hand is politically charged, like climate change.

In part this is the wrong response to science for the reasons I listed above, which is that science is a ruthless examination of everything existing - including stuff you don't care about. But you know what? Things that you don't care about, like say blue green algae, sometimes turn out to be goldmines of information. Though blue green algae, or cyanobacteria, was once deemed an obscure focus for microbiologists, these tiny creatures turn out to be energy powerhouses and are being exploited by many industries now for their potential use in biofuels and chemical processing.

This is also the wrong response to science because often people use the complaint "nobody should be paid to study this" as a proxy for saying what they really mean, which is that they think it's unethical to study things like climate change because it's controversial - or unethical to research the psychology of sarcasm when there are more pressing issues in the world. The fact is that there are certain areas of science that we shouldn't fund because of ethical considerations. One I think we can all agree on is the Tuskegee experiments last century, where African-American men infected with syphilis weren't treated so that doctors could see what would happen to them long term. But the problem wasn't funding the medical science behind treating syphilis - the problem was the unethical way the study was carried out. Likewise, some people have an ethical problem with other areas of scientific study, like climate change, and it's better that we debate it as an ethical dilemma rather than a funding issue so that we know what's really at stake.

So the next time you feel the burning urge to say the problem with a study is the fact that it was funded at all, you should consider two things: 1) Everything deserves scientific scrutiny; and 2) Maybe the problem isn't the funding but the ethics.

Bitch Like This Instead

So often, I wish more people would ask:

1. "Where is the attribution?"

Any article about ideas or innovation that includes the phrase "scientists say" without ever referring back to a specific scientist or study (ideally, with a link to the paper or lab) deserves your scorn. When you don't see any links to source materials and scientists, it's likely that scientists do not actually say the thing the writer is claiming. Instead, the writer simply wants to bolster his or her opinion by making it seem as if it has scientific validity.

In addition, just because one scientist or study has evidence for something does not mean all scientists in their field agree. For example, a recent study challenged the conventional view of long ago humans and chimps split off from each other on the evolutionary tree. Many scientists believe it was roughly 5 million years ago; this new study suggested it could be as long as 11 million. This does not mean scientists now believe that humanity is twice as old. It means we have contradictory evidence, as anthropologist John Hawks gracefully explains in his article about the study. So when you read that one new study has "changed everything" or "now scientists believe," the author of those statements had better have more than one person or study to back up those sweeping claims.

And here's a comment I wish I could see more often:

2. "This news is just a reprinted press release."

There are many fine science sites out there, such as PhysOrg and MedicalXpress, who do nothing but reprint press releases from universities and laboratories without commentary - and without transparently stating that they are posting press releases and not articles. The problem here isn't reprinting press releases per se - in fact, often press releases about science are written very well, by intelligent and informed people who want to educate the public. Nevertheless, press releases are by their very nature biased. They are intended to showcase the importance of a particular group's work, and so they will downplay or simply leave out dissenting views. To reprint them as "news" without acknowledging their potential bias is dishonest.

The dirty secret of science journalism is that our news cycle is almost entirely driven by press releases sent out by universities and journals, alerting the public to new results from often long-term studies. Writers will quote from these releases by saying things like "In a release, the scientists said . . " or "In a statement, the lab explained . . . " These are moments of transparency where a writer is tipping you off that the source of the information is a press release. I don't see any need to bitch about that, though you should take what's said with a grain of salt.

What you do need to bitch about is when press releases are reprinted or quoted from without context. Ideally, you want a news story about a scientific development to include comments from people not involved with the study or the lab where it took place. But in the absence of that, the bias of the press release source should be acknowledged.

My hope is that, armed with this knowledge, your bitching can be more scientifically informed.

Photo by Franck Boston via Shuterstøk

Spider-Man and Venom trade places with Calvin and Hobbes [This Is Awesome]

via io9 by Meredith Woerner on 1/17/12

Artist Timothy Lim swapped out Bill Watterson's mischievous boy and stuffed tiger with Peter Parker and his unruly symbiote. Aww, Venom is so cute when he's trying to munch Peter's skull! Lim's images are also available on t-shirts.

[Via Super Punch]

Trust Charles de Lint to understand the identity crises of shapeshifters [Book Review]

via io9 by Charlie Jane Anders on 1/18/12

Charles de Lint's latest novel, Eyes Like Leaves, is a rollicking epic quest fantasy in which a motley assortment of heroes and ordinary folk strive to save the Summerlord from the Icelord and keep the world from falling into Everwinter. But the most memorable part of it, almost certainly, is the care with which de Lint portrays the sources of magic — and the identity crises of shapeshifters.

Spoilers ahead...

Eyes Like Leaves takes place in a sort of magical version of Britain, full of druids, henges, menhirs, ley lines and sweet rustic folk. The old ways and old gods are being forgotten in favor of the worship of a new god, Dath, and meanwhile the land is menaced by Viking raiders — except the Vikings are called Saramands. Meanwhile, a wizard named Puretongue trains two apprentices for a great task: restore the power of the Summerlord, Hafarl, before his brother, Lothan the Icelord, can destroy him completely and plunge the world into winter forever. Puretongue and his apprentices are hunted by Stormkin, including lizard-y dyorns, direwolves, frosts, and worse.

Here's a typical passage, where Puretongue reflects on the sore state of affairs:

The Summerlord was gone and chaos raced to fill the places where his protection had lain. Puretongue's heart ached with grief. North was the Everwinter. South lay devastation and the ruin of war. And the army moved northward. A disorganized stream of Lothan's minions. Slaying. Laying to waste. And the Saramand — their coming so timely to Lothan's needs.

Puretongue shut the visions from his mind. He was weary of death, weary of this struggle. But it was too late for him to turn from it. What the folk of the Green Isles lost, he lost. And had lost a hundred times over.

The book was originally published, last year, by Subterranean Press, but now it's coming out in a nice trade paperback from Tachyon Press.

I've mostly read de Lint's copious contributions to urban fantasy in the past, which are a bit more restrained and contemporary-feeling. This, on the other hand, is a full-on epic fantasy, in which people are as likely to declaim as to speak. The setting is a pretty standard medieval-ish epic fantasy setting, too, and the characters include the Turpens, a family of tinkers headed by Long Tom Turpen who say things like "Brooms and Heather!" and "It's welcome you'll be." The basic story is a fairly traditional epic fantasy quest, too — in addition to the characters I've already mentioned, there's a young woman named Carrie who turns out to be a kind of "chosen one" who's the only one who can save the Summerlord from the Icelord.

But de Lint's trademark characterization elevates this book above being just another Tolkien tribute. Every character in the book has a few surprising, revealing moments that makes him or her seem more three-dimensional. The main characters, in particular, have strong, complicated arcs that reward the reader for paying attention to small hints early on. Puretongue's first apprentice, Tarn, has a sort of Anakin Skywalker thing going on, but his progression is more believable and more surprising than anything George Lucas managed to pull off in the prequels. Nor does de Lint's eye for small details and signs of everyday life let him down — for all their Celtic cheese, the Green Isles feel like a real place, where people live and work and ply their trades. When we visit with a group of crabbers, de Lint takes the time to give us a little crash course in the economics of crab-fishing.

But most fantasy novels live or die on how well they depict the use and abuse of magic, and not surprisingly, it's here that de Lint excels. Since we see Puretongue training two different apprentices, and meanwhile Carrie is also learning about her special gift, we get to find out a lot about magic works in this world. You have your "taw," which is sort of like your soul or spirit form, and you can draw on it to create magic. But doing so drains you — more so for good magic than evil magic, which thrives on chaos in the world. Druids are supposed to be able to recharge their "taws" by going to henges and other holy places along the ley lines, but these have mostly been destroyed or desecrated, forcing druids to weaken themselves.

And the main form that magic takes in the Green Isles is — delightfully — that of shape-changing. Tarn, the heroic apprentice, is forever changing into a host of thrilling forms. In particular, he has a habit of turning into a unicorn whenever he needs to run fast. You read that right — the hero of the novel turns into a unicorn. He also turns himself into a dragon when the situation is especially dire.

But as you'd expect, shapechanging is not without its perils. The untrained can forget who they really are, and remain trapped in their new forms forever. You have to keep your true name in your mind, or you risk losing yourself. And if you turn into a wolf or something, you start thinking wolf thoughts and behaving according to wolf nature — and the danger only increases if you disguise yourself as one of the evil Stormkin, as Tarn chooses to do.

Tarn, and to some extent all the other shapechanging wizards in the book, is forced to question his own identity, partly as a direct result of his transformations. And meanwhile, Tarn is learning more about who he really is, and where he comes from. Without giving too much away, de Lint's book turns about halfway through into a really fascinating look at the ways in which our shapes shape us. The shapeshifting becomes, in some ways, an amplification of the choice everybody has in real life: We can choose who we want to be, and our choices define us in the end.

The other thing you start to notice in this book is the duality, which stretches from the Icelord and Summerlord all the way down the line. There's two of almost everything in this book. Two old wizards. Two apprentices. Two daughters of the Summerlord. Two sons of the Icelord. And so on. The duality starts to offer a kind of mirror, letting us see how people could be something other than what they are.

So all in all, what looks at first glance like a pretty traditional epic fantasy turns out to be something a bit darker, and stranger. And it does wind up raising some fascinating questions about how we come to be the people we are. Would you expect any less from Charles de Lint?

Watch a staggeringly beautiful time-lapse video of Yosemite National Park [Video]

via io9 by Robert T. Gonzalez on 1/21/12

If you've ever visited California's Yosemite National Park, then you have an appreciation for how absurdly majestic its scenery is. You also know how difficult it can be to encapsulate that majesty when describing it to others; somehow, adjectives like "breathtaking" don't even begin to describe it.

For years, I've referred to Ansel Adams' iconic photographs of Yosemite when describing the Park to friends who have never been. Now, I have this video to show them, as well. Feast your eyes on Project Yosemite — a time-lapse, HD tribute to some of the most jaw-dropping wilderness on Earth.

io9 spoke to the video's creators — photographers Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty — about how the project came together.

"Sheldon shot a video called Cottonwood Lakes to Mt. Whitney, and I contacted him because I wanted to know how hard it was to backpack with a 6 foot dolly," said Delehanty. "He convinced me it wasn't that bad, so I bought one from Dynamic Perception and we planned a trip soon after. Without Dynamic Perception this project wouldn't have been achievable on our budget." The two continue:

For this project we planned to shoot on top of Half Dome at night because very few people would ever go up there at that time, let alone bring a 6 foot aluminum rail and their camera gear to do time-lapses. We wanted to create something that had never been done before. Something special that would put Yosemite in the spotlight.

For those of you wondering, the song in the video is "Outro" by M83, off the album "Hurry up, We're Dreaming."

Visit the Project Yosemite website to learn more, and be sure to follow the links below to check out more incredible work from Neill and Delehanty.

Colin Delehanty: Website | vimeo | 500px
Sheldon Neill: Website | vimeo | 500px

This no-budget science fiction short looks better than most movies [Video]

via io9 by Cyriaque Lamar on 1/21/12

The Aaron Sims Company has designed such celluloid creatures as the aliens from Green Lantern, the simians from Rise of The Planet of The Apes, and the samurai with the chain gun from Sucker Punch. Now, as a labor of love with no funding, Sims has directed Archetype, a short film about a battlefield robot whose programming is on the fritz. It's an absolutely stunning nugget of cinema.

We heard about this project, which stars Robert Joy (Land of the Dead, CSI:NY) and David Anders (Heroes, 24), several months back. What's more, he's planning a feature-length version. Here's a plot synopsis:

RL7 is an eight-foot tall combat robot that goes on the run after malfunctioning with vivid memories of once being human. As its creators and the military close in, RL7 battles its way to uncovering the shocking truth behind its mysterious visions and past.

Via The Aaron Sim Company. Hat tip to Steffen!

No Robots, a beautiful five-minute film about anti-machine prejudice [Video]

via io9 by Cyriaque Lamar on 1/22/12

Hats off to YungHan Chang and Kimberly Knoll for directing this poetic short animation — titled No Robots — as a student project at San Jose State University. In this vignette, an anti-robot shopkeeper must deal with an unexpected clanking visitor. I'm absolutely loving the city design here — the animators deserved to pass in flying colors.

[Via Cartoon Brew]