New Scientist: Chances of aliens finding Earth disappearing
A pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has warned that for any intelligent aliens trying to search for us, “the Earth is going to disappear” very soon.
Frank Drake’s point, made at a SETI workshop at Harvard University on Friday, is that television services are increasingly being delivered by technologies that do not leak radio frequencies into space.
Peter Watts (the science fiction author I mentioned last week; today I went back and read the interview I linked to) has a lovely site, with a blog (personal news side-by-side with science news; no feed, so go read it all), and stories and background on his books.
The story currently featured on his site, Bulk Food (coauthored with Laurie Channer), is a funny and chilling story in classic 2000AD Future Shocks style, dealing with the topic in the title of this post, and drawing on his harrowing real-life experiences as a credentialed whore at UBC’s Marine Mammal Unit
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An interview with Tolkien from 1966, originally published in New Worlds magazine, reprinted in 2001 at Fantastic Metropolis. Interesting for his opinions on Science Fiction – although I suspect that the interviewer, Daphne Castell, might perhaps have skewed the presentation of his views to make them more sympathetic, it does seems that Tolkien saw himself as part of the genre, and he contributes his “Hard Science Fiction” bit – talking about the science of linguisitics.
Oh, yeah, it’s also interesting for the bit about the cats of Queen Beruthiel, which reads like Tolkien demonstrating his myth-making process live to his interviewer.
The site also reprints Rani Graf’s interview with Ted Chiang (from Bli Panika!) And they have a two-part “Old Farts’ Fireside Chat” where Barrington J. Bayley and Michael Moorcock ramble and ruminate.
Ken Hite mercilessly summarizes the latest film’s take on king Arthur:
Its "Arthur" is the (imaginary) lineal descendant of Lucius Artorius Castus (fl. ca. 185 A.D.), himself the only Roman official in Britain known to have borne the name Artorius.
Its "knights" are Sarmatian cataphracti, an interesting (if ridiculously presented) take on a theory proposed first (AFAIK) in the 1920s, and elaborated well beyond all sanity in the terrifically interesting From Scythia to Camelot by Littleton and Malcor.
Its "Britain" is the Land of Silly Stupid Pretend.
For further reading, he recommends Tom Green’s Arthurian Resources (or N.J. Higham’s King Arthur: Myth-Making and History, but warns:
Do not come to either Green or Higham with a romantic spirit, however, or they shall crush you like Arthur may or may not have crushed the Saxons, possibly at Badon Hill, wherever that was, around 540 A.D. or thereabouts, if he existed at all, which there’s barely any scholarly reason to say that he did.
There. I’ve copy-pasted practically all of his entry, except for the bit about The number of Keira Knightley square-inch-seconds
being worth the price of the ticket.
Oops.
The Guardian prints an essay adapted from a book, How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. Against Benjamin Franklin and the repressive protestant work ethic, the author rallies Descartes, Proust, and God himself.