Nick Harkaway's new novel The Gone Away World may have its problems. Its weirdness is sometimes too self-conscious, in a way common to first-time writers, throwing together as he does ninjas, monsters, mimes and other oddities. His view of corporations, around which much of the book hinges, is naive and simplistic; corporations in The Gone Away World are uniformly and inherently dehumanizing and evil without variation or exception, and the hierchy of their employees can be measured in exactly how dehumanized and evil they've become. Yet, whatever its faults, this is exactly the kind of novel I want to read. There's a temptation to call the novel cross-genre, as it mixes both science fiction and fantasy elements (to the extent that they can be distinguished or even defined) with a "literary fiction" sensibility (to the extent that that exists or can be defined). However, cross-genre for me brings to mind someone deliberately taking bits of two genres and joining them together-- the SF detective novel, the literary urban fantasy novel, the paranormal romance and so on. The Gone Away World doesn't so much do that as ignore genre boundaries all together; things happen according to the internal logic of the book, and not because of some loose system of conventions hobbled together over the decades. In the end, he creates something like a map of the human psyche, populated by freakish embodyments of friendship, fear and love.

I'm intentionally avoiding a plot summary because any one I gave would spoil the many twists and turns of the narrative. All you really need to know is that this is a book which is highly entertaining and also contains depth of character and elements of social commentary and satire. It is at turns fun and serious, wacky and emotionally tough, and is representative of a new kind of fiction gradually emerging, a fiction which knows no boundaries.

On the subject of bad decisions, FOX apparently wants to kill the forthcoming Watchmen movie, claiming legal rights to the material that supersede Warner Bros.

"Surprisingly, Fox said it would rather see the film killed instead of collecting a percentage of the box office."

Why? Beats me too.

Could there be Watchmen curse, placed by self-proclaimed occult magician and Watchmen scribe Alan Moore? In any case, one begins to understand why he wants nothing to do with the film industry anymore.

As being widely reported, higher fees for online music imposed by the RIAA may force Pandora.com to close down. Pandora.com is my favorite Internet radio site, and it can't be any better for other Internet Radio enterprises. This is really a classic case of the music industry shooting itself in the foot; by making their rates inordinately high they're not only going to miss out on the revenue they would get from major sites like Pandora having to close, but also from the literally millions of people getting turned on to new music and going out and buying CDs and digital downloads and so on. What a bunch of assholes.

Apparently, they could spring for John Oliver but not for a decent sound editor. Still, a good example of how to make book ads entertaining.

Got a twitter account on a lark. May or may not actually use it, but if any of you out there are twitterers (twitterii?) let me know.

Cloning was just the beginning...

Rat Brain Connected to Robot, Avoids Obstacles.

Metamaterial Renders Objects Invisible

South Koreans Create Fusion

MIT Creates Self-Assembling Artificial Tissue

Army Generators Turn Garbage into Energy

Doritos Ad Beamed into Outer Space

Pixie Dust Regrows Finger?

Open Source 3D Printer Can Copy Itself
Related: Manufacture and Sell Anything in Minutes

Miniature Spy Planes Can Fit in Pocket

Using Body Heat to Charge Your Cell Phone

So many Science Fiction novels are starting to look like Contemporary Fiction now...

Some disturbing correspondence has emerged between Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman, and his publisher Detective Comics (DC), including this little bit of criticism:

Another alleged problem with Shuster's artwork is that it made Superman look gay--or in the period slang of Ellsworth's January 22, 1940 letter, "lah-de-dah" with a "nice fat bottom"--

Also problematic is Lois Lane being too sexy, and in general the quality of co-creator Joe Shuster's artwork.

If you needed any more proof that Windows Vista is the worst thing ever, news comes out of a new, un-fixable exploit,

Presenters at Black Hat revealed that most, if not all, of Windows Vista's security features can be taken out with a single browser exploit, using Java and .NET to execute malicious code. ... As researcher Dino Dai Zovi told SearchSecurity, "that's completely game over."

If you're thinking of buying a new computer, get a Mac or something running Linux. Seriously.

In a recent blog post, comics and prose writer Warren Ellis discusses why the print SF magazines are dying. The key for me is when he says,

As was stated over and over last year, any number of things could be done to help these magazines. But, naturally enough, the magazines’ various teams appear not to consider anything to be wrong.

You all may recall that I recently did a not very flattering review of a recent issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which I discussed in some depth how almost all the stories within were derivative, uninteresting and for the most part crap. However, when that post was discussed on the F&SF message board, I found the editor in chief, Gordon van Gelder, not only unreceptive to my comments, but completely dismissive of them and of me.

First he wrote "I think my attitudes were a lot like yours back when I was 19 or 20. ... One thing I learned is that while I'm completely entitled to my tastes, my likes, my dislikes, it's a mistake to think that everyone else shares them." What are we, in high school? Are you really arguing that all opinions are subjective and the view that they aren't can't be true because you thought that way when you were young?

Then he says that I would be "better served by anthologies" and that it's an old joke that a "Slipstream" magazine would lose money, because he's obviously raking in a fortune as it is. Moreover, he keeps insisting that F&SF is better than ever, and if that was the case why are they loosing readership year after year? And don't say because people are watching TV and movies and playing video games instead; that's a cop out. As Ellis explains in a later post, print is not dead. Not even close. Ellis seems to think that it's too late for the existing SF magazines, for F&SF, Analog, Interzone, and Asimov's. I'm inclined to think he's right.

This is a picture of my Windows laptop plugged into my television with a simple s-video cable and into my stereo with a standard RCA cable, playing an episode of ReGenesis off of Hulu.com. In my hand is my iPod Touch, logged into my computer using the free VNC Lite app. In other words, the computer becomes a media device (also on tap is Netflix Watch It Now content, iTunes content, YouTube etc) for the television, and the Touch becomes a remote control for the media device.

And now you know why I don't need cable or satellite television, a DVR, an Apple TV, a Roku Netflix player, a Vudu or any other such devices.