Steven Hoefer's PlanetShine

It has a been a long minute since that last episode, but there's a good reason! The name is changing, though the content will be the same. I talk briefly about what's going on. And I offer up some good reading to tide you over until the full episodes of next season arrive.

• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Rowanhorse
• Blackfish City by Sam Miller
• The Outside by Ada Hoffman
• The Gurkha and the Lord of Thursday by Saad Hossain
• Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we look at how two stories can simultaneously be strikingly similar and completely different. We also have a roundup of interesting science and technology, N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth books, and Rosemary Kirstein The Steerswoman series.

Show links:

• N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series.
• Rosemary Kirstein The Steerswoman series.
• This year's Ig Nobel Winners and a roundup of the weird science.
• Implanted organs printed from a patent's own cells.
• Why we say 'Hello' when we answer the phone. and why we say 'automobile' instead of oleo locomotive.

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Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about what happens when the wind goes out of your sails, speculative fiction from Fireside, the optimistic present from Future Crunch, and long-term thinking from The Long Now foundation. And we talk about my difficulty with naming things.

Show links:

• Future Crunch
• • Their newsletter subscription..
  • Good News links from past newsletters.
  • Their Patreon.
• The Long Now Foundation
• • List of seminars. (Available as podcasts and videos. Members can get better access.)
  • The 10,000 year clock.
  • The Interval (Their coffee shop and cocktail bar.)
• Fireside Magazine
• • The grown selection of newly published books
  • Their website which features their short fiction (after subscribers get it)
  • Subscriptions If you think what they do is worth money. (It is.)

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Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about coming to terms with things, including glitter, Shakespeare, and loss.

Show links:

• Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed
• Which is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare collection.
• UK exam board fined$250,000 for confusing characters from Romeo and Juliet.
• Clark County inmates learning to engineer, produce, and play music. (Autoplay video warning. Sorry.)
• 10 minute documentary about a very unlikley soul album.YouTube Link. Here's one of their songs.
• Paper: The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities PDF link

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Reader's Room pulls the most fascinating writing from speculative fiction, science, and technology. In this edition we talk about experience on a Japanese leisure island, the unhelpfulness of book blurbs, and Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World.

Show links:

• Odaiba fortresses turned leisure island in Tokyo bay.
• Palette Town giant, eclectic collection of amusements.
• Mega Web. What happens when Toyota builds a theme park.
• The origin of the book blurb.
• Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World.
• Linkdump:
  • How writers mess with our brains.
  • Facial recognition software finds 3000 lost kids in four days.
  • Injecting memories into sea slugs. (Full original paper here.)

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Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about how to grow literature in the desert, the very real ways words can threaten life, as well as Kawamata Chiaki’s novel Death Sentences.

Show links:

• Nevada's Black Mountain Institute
• The Believer magazine
• The Believer Festival
• BMI's City of Asylum program.
• Progenitor of Surrealism, André Breton
• The Surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse
• And the Twitter thread where I talk my way though an editing problem. (Warning: Several swear words.)

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Reader's Room covers the month's speculative fiction, science and technology. In this edition we talk about autonomous vehicles, and how they're still a nuisance on the road if they can't communicate with the humans around them. We also talk about what causes car crashes in professional races, using AI to keep people and sharks safe from each other, and Karin Tidbeck’s powerful short story collection, Jagannath.

Show links:

• Las Vegas's autonomous shuttle.
• The giant, fire breathing mantis at Container Park.
• Linkdump:
  • Studying car crashes in Formula One Racing suggests that competitiveness is more likely to cause crashes than skill or weather.
  • The 2018 Hugo Award nominations are out. Good source of ideas for more for reading, watching, and listening.
  • Australian beaches are looking to protect swimmers from sharks usingAI linked to buoys and drones to sense sharks in the water.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

The Reader's Room talks about speculative fiction, science, and technology. This month, we ask what kinds of changes you might make to your body to improve your work, or better reflect your beliefs.

We also talk about the transhumans in Alistair Reynolds' new book, Elysium Fire, and his 2008 book The Prefect, as well as some of the people and technology taking us forward.

Show Links:

• Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space stories
• • The Prefect (2007)
  • Elysium-Fire (2018)
• Diving for ancient ivory under the Bering Sea at the Anchorage Daily News
• Actress Angel Guiffria
• • @aannggeellll on Twitter
  • Interview with B.J. Murphy on Medium
• Elastic, self repairing sensors at Quartz.

Suggestions, comments, or subscrive to the email newsletter at ReadSteven.com

This month we talk about the possibilities of making a single change in reality, and I get caught up on Charles Stross's Laundry Files novels.

Show links:

• The Atrocity Archives, Stross's first Laundry Files book.
• The Delirium Brief, the most recent novel in the series.
• Laundry Files Reading Order
• MIT's Neuron on a chip at MIT's media site.
• Rab the Giant versus the Witch of the Waterfall at Fireside Fiction
• ‘Atomic Bill’ and the Birth of the Bomb at undark.org, explores the ethics of the New York Times star reporter hired by the Manhattan Project to chronicle and cheerlead the nuclear age.

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com

Reader's Room ponders the best speculative fiction and and science for the month. This edition we look at how and why authors create specilatve worlds, and their impact on storytelling.

Show links:

• We talk about Andy Weir's latest book, Artemis.
• If you have an hour, Weir did an interview about the process of creating Artemis on Conversations with Tyler on Medium. (Both audio and transcript.) 
• If you only have five minutes, he also did an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday in November. (Audio and text excerpts.) 
• Charlie Jane Anders wrote the excellent, The Seven Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding, on her site, io9. It’s a few years old, but it all remains true. A good read for writers, but it'll also give readers some tools to figure out why they love or hate a story world. 
• Imaginary Worlds is a bi-weekly podcast all about world building. It explores everything from author’s creation to fandom. I've mentioned it before, but it's a great resource for getting behind the scenes of your favorite creations, and learning to appreciate entirely new things. 

Suggestions, comments, or subscribe to the newsletter at ReadSteven.com