Book Review: Paintwork

Paintwork was a quick fun read. It's a collection of three loosely related novellas stories, all of which are science fiction with an augmented reality premise.

The first story, for which the book is named, follows a near-future graffiti artist who tags corporate AR billboards with his own custom QR codes, overwriting advertising with custom AR artwork. All is fine until someone starts tagging his works within minutes of his doing so, making him wonder if it's an inside job from within the graffiti community.

The second story, called Paparazzi, is a story about gaming culture and celebrity, with a unique take on gold-farming, and some AR stuff thrown in for good measure. It had an interesting twist at the end that made it's premise quite unique, but I found it the weakest of the three stories.

The third story, Havana Augmented, was a real gem. The story centers on some Cuba-based gamer/hacker types who, without legitimate access to technology or game content, hack their own black-market access to leading MMOs. In the process, they innovate in ways the game authors never imagined, open Cuba to investment capital interests, and go on to wage augmented-reality virtual war in the streets of Havana. I loved the vivid picture the author painted and where he ended up taking the story.

This is great near-term sci-fi, with thought provoking near-future pictures of what some of these technologies may bring, combined with action-packed stories with surprising twists.

Paintwork

Book Review: We, Robot

A while back, I reviewed Mark Stephen Meadow's book Tea Time with Terrorists. Since that time, I got to spend a couple days hanging out with him in Mexico, and he sent me a copy of his latest work, We, Robot to check out.

Needless to say, they are pretty different books in terms of subject matter. If there's a common thread though, its that when the author sets out to understand something, he goes out and finds people who know, where ever they might be.

We, Robot is a rather unique look at our progress in robotics. The book looks at a number of famous Sci-fi robots, from The Jetson's Rosie to the Terminator T-1000 to Avatar's avatars. He then compares them to progress of different projects in the robotics world, asking how close we've come to the original sci-fi vision, and of what differs, why.

It's a fun tour of some of the field's better poster-bot/children, and the interviews with some of their creators are quite interesting.

The real gold for me though, was in some of the conjecture and philosophizing that Meadows does in considering implications of robotics near future. This is especially true when looking at the borders between hardware and software which he sees little distinction. I'm of the same school of thought, but it's surprising how many people deem them completely different.

For example, when considering the implications of privacy and giving one's personal information up to 'trusted' parties, he asks us to consider whether we'd accept a "Rosie"-like robot from Google, provided for free, if in exchange we understood that it would mill about the house in spare time, learning about our personal habits and behavior and such. Is this really so different than G-mail? Really, it's not, when you think about it.

There are a lot of great nuggets of food for thought along these lines. I found myself dog-earing the corners of a lot of pages with the intent of going back to think about more deeply.

At this year's CES, I saw a surprising number of toys and gadgets blurring the lines between digital and physical worlds. Robots will be one of the conduits between those spaces sooner than we think. This book is a good tour of both the state of the art, as well as a tour of some of the unanswered questions.

We, Robot: Skywalker's Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact

Book Review: Super Sad True Love Story

Seeing as how it is mid-January, it's probably too early to call my fave book of 2011, but Super Sad True Love Story is certainly going to rank high on the list.

The book is a romantic tragedy, set amid near-future distopian sci-fi which it uses as heavy satire about current-day American decline and materialism. 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" + "Little Brother" + later Adrian Mole volumes, perhaps. It is to Facebook & Amazon what Halting State was to MMOs and Virtual Worlds.

The love story at it's heart is, as the name implies, sad. However, what I really loved about this book was the commentary on social networking & whuffie, materialism, information control and willful ignorance. One of those pictures of the future close enough to be plausible, and thus disturbing and frightening.

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

Login keynote transcript

Charles Stross has posted his keynote transcript from his Login keynote on his blog. 

It's alook at the next 30 years of gaming, from the eyes of a sci-fi author/futurist. [Though maybe its 20 years? He makes numerous references to the world of 2030, and since we're 2009...]

Stross has spent a lot of time thinking about this. His book Halting State (I blogged about it here) is, IMHO, one of the top 5 reads for anyone interested in thinking about the future of games. The keynote is also a good read. Like any of these things, there are numerous points I disagree with, but anything that makes you think is worth reading to get those few choice morsels.

Amongst the bits I disagree with, the end of computing power improvement - though I loved the airline industry metaphor, and the dismissing of some hairy problems (e.g. that whole virtual keyboard thing), just to name a couple examples. Also, he says near-term futurism is hard to do because of your claims coming back to bite you, but then quickly bails on making any claims about the next five years. 

On the other hand, there are some things he absolutely nails. The augmented reality stuff is already showing signs of life in the real world, and how that blurs the lines between where a game ends and the real world begins. What the market looks like when games are competing with Winnebagos and Golf for 60-somethings share-of-wallet. American market for games being dwarfed by that of places like China and India over time.

Give it a read!

The future is now

Two different sentence fragments from my past week:

The first was my son Tom, when he and I were looking for one of his toys.

"Maybe the robot sucked it up. Can you look inside him?", he said. He was talking about (and personifying!) Roomba of course. It occurred to me that even 10 years ago this might have seemed like science fiction. My kids are growing up with a robot member of the household.

The second was one I uttered to a co-worker. A while ago Wired mag had a series of 6-word science fiction very short stories from known authors (e.g. "The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly." - Orson Scott Card).

I found myself saying something this week that would stand on it's own among those in that article, even if it's a bit longer than six words; "Loan me a memory stick, before I forget".

Diamond Age being made into mini-series!

BoingBoing points out that Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is being made into a mini-series.

Insert sexual-arousal metaphor here.

Man do I love that book. I am so very excited.

I really hope they do it justice. A mini-series is the right direction given the amount of content needed to do the story right.

Hopefully, it performs well and will lead to them licensing the rights to The Baroque Cycle, which would then be made into a long-running series of, five fourteen-episode seasons, with each week's episode running for a contiguous eight hours. The whole thing would ship in a "crate set" because a box wouldn't do it. :-)