Last week I did a panel discussion at the The Last Bookstore (an amazing, twisty, and wonderful independent book shop in Downtown Los Angeles) with three others on Writing Relevant Speculative Fiction. Their blog also hosted an interview with Carrie Patel and myself as a sneak preview so if you missed the live version, you can read some of our thoughts here.
New Releases!
Where the Stars Rise
I received my author copy of this anthology, and I can't wait to read it! All of the stories are originals. Mine is about a colonist to Mars who needs to decide if she's running from her past or toward her future.
"Follow twenty-three science fiction and fantasy authors on their journeys through Asia and beyond. Stories that explore magic and science. Stories about love, revenge, and choices. Stories that challenge ideas about race, belonging, and politics. Stories about where we come from and where we are going."
A portion of the sales for this goes to help disadvantaged kids so not only will you get a wealth of interesting stories to read, you will be supporting a good cause. Buy it here.
Fantastic Stories of the Imagination People of Color Flash Anthology
My very first publication is reprinted in this collection of flash fiction. Buy it here.
"People of color have been publishing some of the highest quality science fiction and fantasy since the genre's earliest days. Yet, there still persists a perception that science fiction and fantasy is somehow a white field. We'd like to help shatter that illusion and showcase some of the finest writer's that science fiction and fantasy has to offer. Here are twenty six flash stories that will do just that."
Human to Robot Symbiosis
Here's a bit of interesting news regarding a human-machine interface from MIT: Brain-controlled Robots.
A new system from MIT CSAIL uses EEG brain signals to detect if a person notices robots making a mistake.
They're a long way from a symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, but this is a good start down that path. This technology strikes me as a clever way to train your robot without the need to sort your dataset up front. The EEG methodology is crude and requires its own customization (a major impediment to general purpose application), but it's easy to imagine a future where we have implants that will give us better information about our thoughts.
Most adults will instinctively correct the behavior of babies and toddlers, and children have an equally native response that cues them to our sentiments. The type of technology that MIT is working on will let us do the same for our future not-so-human helpers. The next question in my mind: how do we make sure our robot toddler doesn't go through a "No!" phase?