dyson spheres are a joke 2025 Sep 21    youtube.com
Via a 55-minute video essay, physicist Angela Collier reads through with us in its entirety Freeman Dyson's famous 1960 physics paper where he proposes the existence of spheres built to enclose a star and therefor harness the complete output of the star's energy – theoretical objects which later became known as Dyson Spheres. She also recreates all the math and physics the paper contains. It doesn't take long, because there is none. The paper is... well, see for yourself.

Ewige Blumenkraft 2025 Jan 29    en.wikipedia.org
Illuminatus! is one of my favorite books, featuring a narrative held together by duct tape and twine but absolutely brimming with cleverness throughout. In my mind it's the conspiracy version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a similar wit and observational awareness shared equally between the two.

Ewige Blumenkraft ("eternal flowerpower") is, according to Illuminatus!, the first half of the passphrase for the Illuminati, ending und ewige Schlangenkraft ("and eternal snakepower"). References are layered on top of each other, alluding to hippies, sexual symbolism, and occult motifs. Blumenkraft is also the name of Ott's first LP, an acid trip into pure psychedelia.

Rejuvenation Roadmap 2024 Dec 3    lifespan.io
These people take the sci-fi concept of immortality via body rejuvenation seriously. So seriously that they've attempted to identify all the scientific progress being done to stop or reverse the aging process. There's ... a lot, and a lot left to do.

Departure Mono 2024 Sep 13    departuremono.com

Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television.

Also the website is sleek.

Human Revolution - Purity First 2024 Sep 10    youtube.com
Thirteen years ago an ad was published to sell a video game called Deus Ex. But unlike most ads, this one is strangely prescient and uniquely horrifying, and feels only more and more so with each passing year.

Sealab, underneath the sea 2024 Aug 29    hds.org
Growing up on science fiction, most of the stories took place on Earth, out in space, or on distant worlds. But there were always a few stories that looked down at our own oceans for their settings. Seaquest DSV, The Abyss, and Sphere are the three that first come to mind, plus of course the Adult Swim re-animated spoof, Sealab 2021.

But far less famous are our nation's actual deep sea living attempts, a series of three Sealab bases on the ocean floor in the 60s. Why this aquanaut program never captured the public's attention like its twin in space did I'll leave as an exercise for the reader, but as I've only recently learned of the program's existence, it's fair to say that humanity probably will not be colonizing the ocean anytime soon.

1939 General Motors Futurliner 2024 Apr 20    thevintagenews.com
In the 1930s GM set out to show Americans what the future looked like, and they did so in a traveling roadshow called Parade of Progress and captained by one of only twelve custom-built art deco megacoaches: The Futurliner. The linked article has a busload of info, and The Drive also has a piece about what they're like behind the wheel.

Abandoned partially-built skyscraper in LA now covered in graffiti 2024 Mar 24    latimes.com
The title about sums it up. Oceanwide Plaza is a $1B construction project that stalled in 2019 leaving downtown Los Angeles with a half-built collection of towers. Now graffiti artists have taken over, producing some dramatic images of huge skyscrapers covered in street art.

Like out of a cyberpunk novel.

A Fire Upon The Deep, Annotated 2024 Mar 21    3e.org
In light of yesterday's news, this link is now spreading around the web, and rightfully so. It's a full copy of Vinge's amazing A Fire Upon the Deep, but annotated mostly by Vinge himself during the writing and development process with his commentary upon his own work.

Vernor Vinge (1944-2024) 2024 Mar 21    file770.com
Massively influential SciFi author Vernor Vinge has passed away.

Somebody Else's Problem Field 2024 Mar 1    hitchhikers.fandom.com
I love HHG2G and have read the omnibus several times. One of the most memorable things from the books is Adams' version of a cloaking device – rather than making your thing invisible, like in Star Trek, the Somebody Else's Problem Field simply renders the object inside to be beneath notice, nothing for you to concern yourself about, invisible by way of being somebody else's problem to solve. What's so great about this is that, unlike the cloaking device, the SEP field isn't science fiction. It happens all the time, everyday, in the cities we inhabit and the homes we live in.

Worldcon in the news 2024 Feb 17    antipope.org
SciFi con drama is spilling over into world events again, this time with Worldcon and the bizarre way in which the con runs, and therefore nominates books for SciFi's Hugo award. Apparently this last year's Hugo nomination and vote-tallying processes bumped into Chinese state censorship. So that's fun.

Greg Egan's Home Page 2024 Jan 8    gregegan.net
Greg Egan is a hard scifi author whose stories I've probably read, but that's not why I'm linking his homepage here. I'm linking his homepage here because of how much it is a testament to the beauty of old web. Of weird web. Of indie web. An example of a website that is fun to explore, not a droll collection of templated tabs.

"Ambient," a novel by Jack Womack 2023 Sep 15    kirkusreviews.com
Somewhere around eighteen years old I was for the first time mindblown by the expansive and horrific beauty of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). I found the narrative confusing but the imagery sublime. Now, at forty, I understood more but feared the impact would be lesser. Fortunately, my fears were wrong; the books hold up – they continue to be just as amazing as they ever were. As a bonus, these new editions contain a more-recent note from Gibson himself. For some reason, he spends most of the note lamenting the total absence of cell phones from the world he created. Take it from me, Gibson: their absence wasn't felt.

Also, one of the three books contains another foreword, or afterword, or note or something by author Jack Womack, where Womack concedes what an honor it is for a schmuck like him to even be mentioned in the same sentence as Gibson, and how some generous critic back in the 80s put Gibson's debut, Neuromancer, on the same list as his own debut, Ambient. I forget the rest of what Womack wrote (I could go back and re-read it, or... :man_shrugging:), and I've never heard of his book (nor, based on its lack of popularity online, have many people in the last thirty years), but this was enough of an endorsement for me to jump right into Ambient.

And wow, was Ambient a big fat fist in the face. Nothing like Gibson's Sprawl books – except maybe in their cynical deconstruction of the society and time which spawned them. Ambient is not an easy book to read. It's very slow to start, it's dense with two entirely different homebrewed lingoes, its internal consistency is questionable, and it's so casually brutally vulgarly violent. And yet... it's depictions of a New York City ruled by the nonchalantly cruel moguls of anarcho-capitalism are so vivid, so visceral, it's an image I will long remember. Do I endorse the book? (Does anyone care if I endorse the book?) Sure, go out and read it. Get yourself teethkicked.

Ambient's scant reviews are mixed and full of comparisons not to Neuromancer, but to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, a story with which I am familiar only via Kubrick's film. I do love me some Kubrick (my bedroom is decorated with – amongst other items, I'm not a psychopath – a framed theatrical poster for Dr. Strangelove) but most mentions of Clockwork are accompanied by tired explanations of how the movie and novel are different things, and their creators different people. And so now I begin flipping the pages of yet another violent, lingo-heavy romp through dystopia.

Aliens: How Burke takes his coffee 2023 Mar 11    morgue.isprettyawesome.com
I'm always a fan of appreciating the details in a movie I love. But as a quick analysis of how cleverly Burke's subtle villainy was crafted, this is a fun journey back into the universe of the xenomorphs.