Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark The Battle Over Zomia
Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden…

September 5 2011, 5:20am | Comments
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Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy

September 4 2011, 6:12pm | Comments
Bookmark The Things, by Peter Watts
I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being Childs.…

June 20 2011, 5:13am | Comments
Metafilter New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken…

June 19 2011, 5:29am | Comments
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A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou: “Who Goes There”

June 2 2011, 4:09am | Comments
Bookmark Flash Symposium at Birkbeck, 24th May 2011
Ideal for the commute, the lunch-hour, the stolen moment: shortness necessitates the perfect user-friendly format, arguably suited to the fast paced nature of everyday contemporary urban living. At the same time…

May 17 2011, 2:26pm | Comments
Bookmark The Philosophy of Insomnia
Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, "When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who…

April 21 2011, 2:44am | Comments
Bookmark Loving the Ghost in the Machine: Aesthetics of Interruption
In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a malfunction,…

April 9 2011, 2:17am | Comments
Bookmark The Temporary Autonomous Zone
I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not only…

January 22 2011, 5:43am | Comments
Bookmark When new narratives meet old brains
We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating "We are our narratives"…

November 25 2010, 8:29am | Comments
Bookmark Myths of a Near Future: Simon Sellars, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale…
Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held…

November 15 2010, 2:31am | Comments
Bookmark Ridley Scott goes back to Philip K. Dick for The Man In…
According to the Guardian Ridley Scott is producing a four-part BBC miniseries based on Philip K Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle. Howard Brenton, the playwright and Spooks writer,…

October 8 2010, 3:45am | Comments
Bookmark Is There Too Much Exposition in Games?
"Exposition is a dirty word," was one of Kasavin's top points. Too many developers front- or back-load games with heavy exposition to create the game world instead of smartly weaving it…

October 7 2010, 2:31am | Comments
Bookmark J.G. Ballard reviews Chris Marker's La Jetee
This review appeared in New Worlds in 1966 and as far as I can tell is currently unavailable anywhere else.

September 24 2010, 7:38am | Comments
Bookmark Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their…
What do scientists think about seeing their fields of research pulverized by science fiction? We asked researchers from diverse fields to tell us whether any science fiction gets it right. Several…

September 23 2010, 5:07am | Comments
Writing from 3quarksdaily And Another ‘Thing’ : Sci-Fi Truths and Nature's Errors

September 5 2010, 9:20pm | Comments
Bookmark Interpretation as a Fine Art
A hot summer day, C not yet out, the Booker judges still busy deciding on this year’s longlist, I go to meet Tom McCarthy. On the way to the cafe, I…

August 27 2010, 12:20pm | Comments
Bookmark The Mind's I
Now available for free online: The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C.…

August 16 2010, 3:30am | Comments
Bookmark The love of the high-end (book) heist
Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity (among the susceptible) is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, the obsession to possess books, was first recognised as…

August 13 2010, 4:30am | Comments
Bookmark The 10 Most Disgusting Alien Civilizations
We've dedicated this Power Grid to the most disgusting alien civilizations to ever grace the page, screen, or hard drive. Why is biology used as technology the easiest way to make…

August 10 2010, 6:56am | Comments
Writing from 3quarksdaily 'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-Fi Archaeology

August 8 2010, 9:05pm | Comments
Bookmark Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard
Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts literature's…

July 25 2010, 7:13am | Comments
Bookmark Who Goes There by John W. Campbell
Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was…

July 16 2010, 3:46am | Comments
Writing from 3quarksdaily A Diatribe from the Remains of Dr. Fred McCabe

July 11 2010, 9:25pm | Comments
Bookmark Borges on Pleasure Island
Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical…

July 1 2010, 2:17am | Comments
Bookmark Are video games the next great art form?
Video games have come a very long way since the 1980s... As Tom Bissell, a journalist, former Salon writer and lifelong gamer, explains in his new book, "Extra Lives: Why Video…

June 21 2010, 7:02am | Comments
Bookmark Why science fiction matters for people who don’t read science fiction
Science fiction dates as quickly as any genre, and Bradbury is not entirely immune to this. The futuristic rocket ships he wrote about in 1950 look a lot like the first-generation…

May 16 2010, 4:34pm | Comments
Bookmark Astral Weeks: An unexpected, and welcome, DeLillo discovery
In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on…

May 16 2010, 4:33pm | Comments
Bookmark Game Design as Make-Believe (4): Fictional Worlds
When one plays most videogames there is a tacit understanding that one is entering into a fictional world – the term virtual world, is often deployed to mean exactly this. It…

May 12 2010, 3:28pm | Comments
Bookmark Zombie Renaissance
Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can…

May 1 2010, 9:44am | Comments
Bookmark Is "Science Fiction Humanism" A Contradiction In Terms?
People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity,…

March 10 2010, 9:54am | Comments
Bookmark The 'Basic' Plots in Literature
Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only a…

March 9 2010, 3:35pm | Comments

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