Shortly after Neil Clarke, editor and publisher of Clarkesworld, posted this, the magazine closed its submission portal. Clarkesworld is one of the higher paying SFF short fiction markets; let’s hope this is temporary.
Nerds of a Feather reviews Malka Older’s latest book, The Mimicking of Known Successes.
This is from last year, but the book, The Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand, is due out soon, so I thought I’d share this interview.
A 15th-century Swedish politician’s plans foundered when his warship caught fire and sank, but it led to the discovery of a larder of exotic spices, preserved five hundred years later. I wonder if the saffron’s still good? That stuff’s expensive!
This week in nautilus news, three new species were recently identified.
Ars Technica gives an exuberant overview—not quite a review—of the new game Atomic Heart.
Mardi Gras looks different in Cajun country, Atlas Obscura tells us. I’m not sure how happy the chickens are with this festival.
The conventions are opening up registrations. Here is WisCon’s. ReaderCon has moved to July. SWFA’s Nebula weekend conflicts with WisCon, which doesn’t seem surprising. It looks as if the ChengDu WorldCon site is live, but they’ve announced a change of date (to October) and a change in venue, and over on File770, at least one community member is worried.
Thomas Bowdler gained notoriety when, in 1836, he revised Shakespeare to cut out all the “naughty bits.” I mention this because Puffin has updated and revised Roald Dahl’s books, to much consternation and use of the word bowdlerized.
Black women were pilots, and a proud part of the Tuskegee Airmen, who celebrate them on their website.
It’s not readily apparent what solution Clarkesworld can come up with for what are basically spam submissions, while also keeping barriers low for submissions from real authors living in other countries or having limited financial resources. And what we’re seeing now are only the opening salvos in a probable war of attrition.
Another story worth following is this Supreme Court case (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/scotus-confused-after-hearing-arguments-for-weakening-section-230-immunity/), one of two that questions whether the Communication Decency Act’s Section 230 legal protection for online services over content created by their users also covers algorithms that the service providers use to recommend that content to other users. So the nuance is not that terrorists recruited people on Twitter (for instance) to carry out terrorist acts, which Twitter can’t be blamed for, but that Twitter’s algorithms recommended the terrorist recruitment posts to other users.
I don’t think any of the popular cyberpunk works were predicting these types of issues.
Paul–I’ve been following the two cases at the Supreme Court with interest. The fact that the original law was written in the 90s indicates to me that it should at least be updated, but hard to imagine how that would happen in this political climate.
Malka Older doesn’t write cyberpunk, but her Infomocracy trilogy takes a look at these issues.