Missing Mary Road

the meaning of liff, thhgttg and dirk gently’s detective holistic agency are some of the funniest comedic sci-fi novels ever written. well the meaning of liff wasn’t really a novel. anyway, doug adams was a big fan of the internet and would commonly post to usenet back in the day. here’s his first posting on usenet.

I’ve finally managed to get a convenient connection to the Internet. I opened an account at the Santa Fe Institute earlier in the year, but it was slow and complicated using it from London so I gave up on it. I know there is a ton of accumulated mail on my Santa Fe account, which I will try and get to. I’ll try and post news here from time to time if it seems like it might interest people – for instance, it looks as if the HHGG movie is finally coming after the shelf after 10 years.

i wrote about richard dawkins a little while ago and how he debunks harun yahya’s ‘atlas of creation’. anyway, seems like the turkish government decided to reprimand him slightly and now his website is unavailable for everyone within turkey.

Oktar, a household name in Turkey, has used hundreds of books, pamphlets and DVDs to contest Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 2006 his publishers sent out 10,000 copies of the Atlas of Creation, a lavish book rejecting evolution on every one of its 800 pages. Dawkins, one of the recipients, described the book as “preposterous”. On his website the British biologist and popular science writer said he was at “a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content”. It is the third time Oktar and his associates have succeeded in blocking sites in Turkey. In August 2007 Oktar persuaded a court to block access to WordPress.com. His lawyers argued that blogs on the site contained libellous material that it was unwilling to remove. Last April he made a libel complaint about Google Groups, which was subsequently blocked.

Map of the day from National Geographic has a really neat (and zoomable) fictional map of the Marvelous Land of Oz, illustrated by James E. Haff and Dick Martin for the International Wizard of Oz Club (apparently there is such a thing) based on L. Frank Baum’s books The Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.
And did you know that when the movie version of The Wizard of Oz opened in 1939, the very first theater that screened it was in the small town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin? Three days later, the movie premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

Islam’s in the news a lot lately, but usually put in the context in a negative spotlight lately it seems. Even less do you ever hear it in the same context with science fiction. A friend has been quietly collecting and creating an anthology of islamic science fiction over the past few years and trying to gather as much information as possible. The project came together and became rather successful and of late, he along with Ahmed A. Khan has put together an Anthology of Islamic Science Fiction portrayed in a positive view. Everything is in place for the Islam Sci-Fi Anthology project, almost that is. They are short of $300 to give to the authors. If you would be interested in donating to this project leave a comment here or go to IslamSciFi directly and we shall try and get you in touch with the authors in the anthology directly to make the process transparent so that the money could be directly forwarded to them.

Why the anthology?

Islam is the most misrepresented religion in the media and literature. Science Fiction is the most popular genre that looks to the future. This anthology is an effort to use the medium of SF to raise the positive image of Islam in the West.

What is theme of the anthology?

The anthology features SF and fantasy stories that portray Islam and/or Muslims in a positive light.

Who are the writers featured in the anthology?

The anthology features stories from international writers. We were lucky to get the cooperation of well-known SF writers, like Lucius Shepard, Tom Ligon, Jetse de Vries, etc.

Editors:

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota. He has a long interest in underlying philosophical themes in Science Fiction. His website, islamscifi.com, is one of the best and most comprehensive resources about Islam and Muslims in science fiction literature, movies, comics and other media.

Ahmed A. Khan is a Canadian writer and editor whose works have been featured in Interzone, Science Today and several other venues. He has edited the anthology, “Fall and Rise”, featuring stories on the theme of survival ethics. He maintains a blog at ahmedakhan.livejournal.com.

Table of Contents

• Lucius Shepard:  A Walk in the Garden
• Tom Ligon:   For a Little Price
• Jetse De Vries:  Cultural Clashes in Cadiz
• Howard Jones:   Servent of Iblis
• Andrew Ferguson:  Organic Geometry
• Ahmed A. Khan:  Synchronicity
• Camille Alexa:  The Weight of Space and Metal
• G.W. Thomas:   The Emissary
• Kevin Miller:   A Straight Path Through the Stars
• Pamela Taylor:  Recompense
• Casey Wolf:   Miss Lonelygenes
• D.C. McMahon:  Squat

DC held out till the very end of Comic-Con to drop its biggest bit of news: Neil Gaiman is returning to the publisher for a two-issue Batman series with artist Andy Kubert.

Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? will serve as a transition point between Batman R.I.P. and whatever comes next. Dan DiDio shared a little with Newsarama:

Newsarama: Dan, obviously the title is a reference to Alan Moore’s Superman story, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Are there parallels between this story and that one?

Dan DiDio: There are a number of parallels to that. There’s a very particular reason why we call it that, and that information will be coming out later on, but with this, we wanted to get someone of that particular stature to tell this story, a story that will really define the years of Batman’s life.

And Gaiman has posted about it on his blog, though he’s even less forthcoming:

So I don’t have to write lots and lots of emails back to all the journalists:

1) Yes, I am writing a two part Batman story.

2) Yes, Andy Kubert will be drawing it.

3) Yes, it will be two oversized issues.

4) No, I don’t plan to say anything else about it until it’s all written and drawn.

(I just called my Visa card to fix something, and found myself being asked if I was the Neil Gaiman. I said yes, I was. “So,” said the Visa person, “Are you going to be writing an episode of Dr Who?”)

what does it take to become batman in real life? scientific american takes a closer look.

I’m reading SpyCraft: The Secret History of the CIA ’s Spytechs From Communism to Al Qaeda right now. I can’t put it down. I highly recommend you read it. Will review it when I complete it.

Spymasters have long sought special technology to enhance security of agents risking their lives to steal and communicate secrets. Application of advanced U.S. technology to espionage focused by America’s entrance into the “spy game” during World War II, transformed intelligence operations forever. Unfettered by clandestine tradition, the boundless wartime ingenuity of American engineers and scientists launched a technological revolution in espionage.

1001 (fictional) books every person should read before they die. i’m skimming through the list and these are the ones off the top of my head that i’ve read. the more i read though, the more i realize i’m becoming a fan of non-fiction and reading fiction is getting more and more distasteful. what are some of your favourites from the list?

Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace – seen the movie, not read the book
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Contact – Carl Sagan
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Life of Pi – Yann Martel

what if charles schultz wrote watchmen. well you’d get something similar to this.

previously what if it were written by stan lee?

via

Using “favorite books” data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of “books that make you dumb”. Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the “smartest” books while the Zane erotica books are the “dumbest”.

So another book has been written about the army. Its the first study of the various profitable corporations that the Pakistan Army runs. The last I can see is that the book was banned and taken off the shelves, its launching ceremony was cancelled and all other hotels and auditoriums in Islamabad refused to allow the book launch because “the authorities” told them to. Please go out and buy the book. If you don’t wish to, you can download it here. The book was shared by the author to get her version of the truth to you, but please encourage her efforts. What is the scale of the corporate interests of the Pakistan Military? Is the Pakistan military the only one in the world that indulges in what author Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa calls “Milbus” – A “Military Business”? What are the implications of the military economy for Pakistan as a whole including its political and social costs?

The reality is that after eighteen years and countless false promises, ExxonMobil has still not paid the billions of dollars in punitive damages that the courts have determined it owes the spill victims–this despite the fact that the company posted the most profitable year in 2006 of any corporation in history. In 1994, a federal court in Anchorage, Alaska, awarded $5 billion in punitive damages to fishermen, Native Alaskans, and other plaintiffs in a class action suit against the oil giant. But rather than accepting its obligations Exxon has been fighting the verdict, employing hundreds of lawyers, filing countless appeals and effectively buying science that supports its claims.

This has added injury to injury as more than 30,000 people whose lives and livelihood were disrupted by the spill have now been dragged through years of litigation. During this time, according to the advocacy group ExposeExxon whose excellent mailing prompted this column, 6,000 plaintiffs have died waiting for compensation.

Keep reading at The Nation.

By the way, I also finished reading “Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblowers Story“. A fascinating insight on how greedy corporations can really get and how the term business ethics is an oxymoron.

Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been published and been reviewed by the Guardian.

The janissaries of the Ottoman empire were captured Christian boys trained to fight against their own people, which they did with singular ferocity. This interesting class of warrior is described during a business lunch to Changez, the young hero of Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, at a moment of crisis over his own identity. Born in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and currently the hottest new employee at a New York firm specialising in ruthless appraisals of ailing companies being targeted for takeover, Changez recognises himself in the description. “I was a modern-day janissary,” he observes, “a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine …”

The recognition completes a process of inward transformation that began when he realised he was half-gladdened by the World Trade Center attacks, and it now prompts him to sabotage his own high-flying career, to give up his pursuit of the beautiful, troubled Wasp princess Erica and go back to Lahore. There, bearded and generally reacculturated, he meets an American in a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district, and buttonholes him with his life story.

Try envisioning the tenth dimension from this fascinating flash presentation that explains everything from the first to the tenth dimension. My head started to tingle after the fifth. It’s meant to illustrate Rob Bryanton’s book Imagining the 10th Dimension, which largely concerns itself with superstring theory. However, the easy confidence Brytanton uses to explain all possible dimensions is just a completely joy. I’m particularly delighted that I understood every single concept he mentioned and I’m sure most of you can as well.