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The celebrity atheist list

June 22, 2008 / Klint Finley

The celebrity atheist list is just what it sounds like: a large list of notable atheists. I recently commented at Dedroidify that atheists are not all jaded office workers and evil scientists, but many are artists, writers, etc. I think everyone will find a few people who enhanced their lives.

The Celebrity Atheist List

Here are a few of my favorites:

Douglas Adams
J.G Ballard
George Carlin
David Cronenberg
Warren Ellis
Brian Eno
Theo van Gogh
Eddie Izzard
Billy Joel
Milan Kundera
Bruce Lee
Sir Ian McKellen
Frank Miller
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gary Numan
Trent Reznor
Bruce Sterling

I would add to the list Haruki Murakami.

(And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.)

Excellent William Gibson interview

June 13, 2008 / Klint Finley

I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother’s family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I’m happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I’m into hybrid vigor.

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it’s not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

[…]

None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

io9: William Gibson Talks to io9 About Canada, Draft Dodging, and Godzilla

Is Charlotte Roche the lady JG Ballard?

June 9, 2008 / Klint Finley

charlotte roche

With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel (‘Feuchtgebiete,’ in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list.

The book, which will be published next year in the United States, is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper.

‘Wetlands’ opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen’s hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and – here is where the debate kicks in – just possibly female empowerment.

Full Story: New York Times

Jezebel provides an amateur translation of an excerpt, since the book won’t be available in English until next year.

(via Tomorrow Museum)

RIP: Author Robert Asprin

May 23, 2008 / TiamatsVision

As a fan of the Myth Adventure series I was saddened to find out that sci-fi, fantasy author Robert Asprin died from a heart attack. He will be missed.

Via his website:

“On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend. He is survived by his mother, his sister, his daughter and his son, and his cat, Princess, not to mention countless friends and fans and numerous legendary fictional characters. He will be greatly missed.”

BBC Radio Interview with Terry Pratchett

May 21, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Terry Pratchett has sold more than 55 million books worldwide. He was the UK’s best selling author until JK Rowling came along, he’s been awarded an OBE and won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Literature. He’s a multi-millionaire and his fans love him – and he has an awful lot of them. But he hasn’t got his health. He’s been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 60. For this week’s On The Ropes he talks to John Humphries about his life, his work and how he’s coping with a disease that – so far – has no cure.”

(via BBC Radio: On The Ropes. h/t SF Signal. Picture by Josh Kirby)

An Interview with Jennifer Stevenson- Author of “The Brass Bed”

May 3, 2008 / TiamatsVision

The Brass Bed Cover

Jennifer Stevenson is the author of ‘Trash Sex Magic’, and most recently wrote a trilogy of sexy, funny, romantic fantasy, the first of which was recently released called ‘The Brass Bed’ (Ballantine Books). She’s been writing for 25 years and lives in the Chicago area with her husband of 30 years and her two cats.

The Brass Bed begins with the heroine, Jewel Heiss, a tough fraud cop investigating a fake sex therapist, Clay, who has been using an antique brass bed to lure his customers. Trapped inside the bed is Lord Randall (Randy), who in 1811 was cursed and turned into an incubus by his magician-mistress for being lousy in bed. The curse was this: satisfy one hundred women or be trapped in the bed forever. Lucky Jewel was number one hundred, and Randy becomes her personal sex slave. The choice: Clay or Randy? This is where the fun really begins.

I don’t usually read much fiction, but found myself flying through all three books (‘The Velvet Chair’ is the second [coming out in late May], and ‘The Bearskin Rug’ is the third). There’s plenty of humor, sex and magic to keep anyone reading into the wee hours. The ending in the last book (‘The Bearskin Rug’) was a bit of a surprise. If you like funny romantic fantasy, you’ll love this series.

I sat down with Jennifer to discuss her new book, and to get some of her views on magic, and sex demons.

King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory

May 1, 2008 / Fell

Photos of a Masonic handbook from 1920 called King Solomon and His Followers — A Valuable Aid to the Memory. The text is written in shorthand. (via kottke + clusterflock)

Scott Bakker is back, with ‘Neuropath’

April 26, 2008 / Fell

One of my all-time favourite authors, R. Scott Bakker, is back, on hiatus from his trodden fantasy path to tackle the psycho-thriller genre. And while the cover of the book and the tagline you see there are an utter cliché of the genre (blame his publishers — bad Penguin Canada, baad), his content is terrifically intense and realistic, with beautiful doses of poetics and philosophy for flavour. (Read a prior bit about his literary-fantasy series, The Prince of Nothing.)

There is an insightful interview with Mr Bakker over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist where he delves into the reasons for writing the book and what issues he wanted to tackle with this project. (I like that he started the project for his wife, aww.):

Scott: Are the muggles ready for Neuropath? That remains to be seen. The vast majority of readers will reject the vast bulk of the claims made in the book – that goes without saying, I think. Our incompetence as theory believers pretty much assures that people will refuse to acknowledge their incompetence as theory believers, and so muster all the power their myriad biases have to offer. Just for instance, you would think that encountering well-formed counterarguments would make people more skeptical of their own beliefs – after all, someone has to be wrong and it could very well be you – but research has shown that precisely the opposite is the case. Thanks to things like source bias, selective attention, confirmation bias, and so on, we almost always feel that we have utterly demolished those counterarguments, and if our position is so strong as to demolish well-formed counterarguments, well then, it simply has to be true! In other words, we draw the most irrational, self-serving conclusion possible. […]

Pat: The thesis underlying the novel is that there is no such thing as human free will and that consciousness as we know it is illusory. Do you believe that this controversial premise is the reason why it was difficult for you to find a home for this manuscript?

Scott: In the US, maybe. But I really think that the problem had more to do with the fact that the content was philosophical, more than the specific nature of that content. I had one very high profile NYC editor call me up to explain why he was passing on the book, even though he thought it was the most disturbing thing he’d read in 10 years! That’s literally what he said. What it came down to was that he thought the book was too cerebral to sell in the American market.

Pat: Given the subject matter presented in Neuropath, do you personally have any hope that humans can overcome their "hardwiring" (whether it be via social engineering or genetic manipulation)? Or is "rewiring" something that scares you even more than the present condition?

Scott: We’re fucked.

[Obviously continued… even with some new info on the upcoming Prince of Nothing instalment!]

Available in Canada on 6 May, U.K. on the 7th, France and Germany on the 29th, as an import in the U.S. on the 15th, et cetera.

J.G. Ballard autobiography reviewed

April 21, 2008 / Klint Finley

But still, he could gaze out of the window of his parents’ big American car as the chauffeur drove him and his nanny through the city, marvelling at the ?bright but bloody kaleidoscope’ outside: ?the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ?a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the internment of American and European civilians in 1943, he would ride his bike for hours around the city. ?Even as a ten-year-old who had known nothing else, the extreme poverty of the Chinese, the deaths and disease and orphans left to starve in doorways, unsettled me as it must have unsettled my parents.’ It is almost too obvious to need saying that the seeds of Ballard’s science fiction, of all his dystopian futures, were planted during his childhood in Shanghai. When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ?sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes . . . the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’

Full Story: London Review of Books.

A look at the unreleased sequal to the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game

April 18, 2008 / Klint Finley

Andy Baio’s gotten a hold of an entire backup of an Infocom shared network drive from 1989, and it includes a look into the history of the aborted sequel, and a peek at what it would have looked like:

MILLIWAYS or RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Takes up where “Hitchhiker’s” left off. Manufactured planets, Deep Thought, white mice, time travel, 1001 verb tenses, digital watches, the Frogstar, Total Perspective Vortex, the End of History! (Does Douglas really want to work on this at this time? Does it matter?)

1. It seems natural to include a scene in the restaurant, Milliways. Could be a bit of fun: strange parties, unctuous compere, self-introducing food. Perhaps there’s an object there that you need to get. (It could be a SPORK, a spoon with sort of forky tines on the end. Or would that be a FOON?) It could be a vehicle from the car park — Marvin has the keys. If you manage to re-enter Milliways at another time (oops! on another occasion), you will not meet yourself, “because of the embarrassment that usually causes.” What about a visit to the Big Bang Burger Bar?

Full Story: Waxy.

(Thanks Gabbo!)

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