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A Book by its Cover: Bioshock: Rapture, by John Shirley

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This amazing new addition to the Bioshock world is set in an ultra modern city in which people live in enclaves based on moments in history.  Our hero, Lewis Snodgrass, lives in an enclave that is obsessed with the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  The peculiar ladies and gentlemen that live in this enclave are convinced that the sleek outside world is merely a facade to hide the moral and cultural decay of 2267.  Mr. Snodgrass is prone to agree until the body of a nursemaid is found in an airlock having died of exposure to the toxic atmosphere that plunges New York into a perpetually crystalline twilight.  Mr. Snodgrass’s investigation leads him to a seedy underground world of nanodrug use, a beguiling housewife, and an eccentric sculptor. John Shirley has successfully combined hard science fiction with Steampunk noir.  The world created in Bioshock: Rapture is both sleakly futuristic and depressingly gritty.  The delusions of the World’s Fair Enclave are a perfect metaphor for the topsy turvy future society.   If I have any complaint it is that the main characters are somewhat dull and tend to blur into the landscape, but perhaps this too is part of Shirley’s scathing critique of a society in which people cling strongly to delusions, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Occasionally the plot seems haphazard and poorly thought out, but the beautiful world building makes this easy to forgive. All in all, Bioshock: Rapture is an excellent book that is well worth a good read. Available July 19, 2011. (A Book by its Cover is our new weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about.  Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)

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SFFTV: The 9 Lives (episodes 3 & 4) of Teen Wolf (episodes 5 & 6)

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You’ll have to excuse me, I’m having a skeptical day.  Both episodes of both of these shows are getting a little obvious.  It makes me wonder if ABC Family and MTV are under the assumption that all its viewers are ignoramuses (ok, yah, I probably should have realized this sooner.. I mean… look at their other programming).  This is a distinct possibility, but it’s a bit condescending.  I generally don’t like being brow beaten by clever story lines, because it means that they’re not all that clever to start with, but then again, maybe it’s because these are fantasy shows designed for people who don’t like fantasy.  I’ll have to consider this possibility before I watch next week. Spoilers Ahead!

Viking Amoeba

A New Viking Amoeba Recruit from Philippa Ballantine

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I’m waiting for the day when a microbiologist stumbles upon this blog and tells me I’m being clever with these Viking Amoeba.  After all, I do an extraordinary amount of research on these things. In any case, here’s the new recruit: The Shield — Palustria Apteryxe Strength 6; Intelligence 3 Special Ability: Encase (divert all damage dealt to one ofyour amoeba to Palustria; reduce that damage by half) (Geist by Philippa Ballantine)

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Feed the Machine: Ah, My Eye!

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Clicketh This article is incredibly cool.  I think biological based SF is poised for an explosion.  Most Hard SF is based upon physics or astronomy.  Sometimes nanotech, which is an offshoot of chemistry, but the advances being made in biology are exceeding what we are coming up with in SF. This article immediately made me think of the pleasure gun in Niven’s Ringworld.  Instead of debilitating with pain, it debilitated by over-excited the pleasure centers of the targets body.  But much more devious things can be done with reward-reinforcement training.  What about a weapon that released dried algae into the atmosphere, and then a photon bomb that triggered the reward pathways the algae inhabited?  Wouldn’t a bomb be limitless in power?  What about an optical virus, that created regressive loops in the viewers brain? What would happen if all one had to do to stop addiction is drink a shot of blue-green algae juice and look at a glorified light bulb?  What would the world be like sans addiction?  Would cigarette companies buy-out the start-ups developing these technologies and destroy them?  Would people start using more drugs with the ease of quitting them?  Would excuses ala Tiger Woods and David Duchovny be a thing of the past? I’m trying to show that any of these science articles can be used to explore both bad and good futures.  SF is getting so dark.  Don’t forget that our lives today were the future of someone a hundred years ago.          

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SFFTV: Outcasts (Ep. 2) and Falling Skies (Ep. 3)

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The second episode of Outcasts is another strong showing.  A handful of escape pods have made their way to the surface of Carpathia, leaving the citizens of Forthaven the task of finding them and bringing their inhabitants to safety.  But there are other people out in the wilderness of Carpathia.  People thought to be dead.  People who have a dark history with Forthaven and its first settlers.  And they’ve taken a survivor from the CT9, the first ship to arrive in Carpathia in five years, well after the pulse beacon from Earth went silent… I love this show.  I really do.  Everything about it screams “I am good.”  The cast is solid, the characters diverse, three-dimensional, and interesting, and the production quality, as I’ve already said, is remarkable.  The first episode set the

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