The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb

Philip K. Dick Fans website presents a Robert Crumb comics about Philip Dick's "Valis" experience, first published in Weirdo comic #17 from summer, 1986.

It is an interesting graphic interpretation of a series of events which happened to Dick in March of 1974. He spent the remaining years of his life trying to figure out what happened in those fateful months.

You will find all 8 pages of this story here. The file sizes are rather large (120-140K each) so that the text was readable and the detail visible.

The Seasons of the Ansarac by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Infinite Matrix presents the full text of the short story The Seasons of the Ansarac by Ursula K. Le Guin:

People are always telling you that "we have always done thus," and then you find that their "always" means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips, compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have "always" done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice…

Two Stories by Goran Petrov, a Macedonian Science Fiction Author

Goran Petrov, a science fiction author from Macedonia, has so far published two stories online via the web magazine Agora:

• Tossed Coin (Фрлена паричка)
• Zeitgeist (Духот на времето), award winner of Nova Makedonija short story competition.
  

Both of these stories will be included in his upcoming book.

Video: Cyberpunk Educator

The Cyberpunk Educator is "1980's study of cyberpunk film for structural, literary and political content. Or if you, prefer, the story of existentialist robots with guns."

The authors use the term in very broad sense and provide sometimes surprising, but always relevant connections, dispensing knowledge about number of notions, including some of the basic premises of Western Civilisation.

Beware: this free film, made available by www.cyberpunkfilm.com, is 1:40 hrs long, and can suck you in like the mythical heroes it discusses. Even if you don't fully agree with its conclusions, it can serve as a reminder to see again some classic movies.

Side note: it might be wise to dowload the movie soon, before the copyright lawyers get it. It even includes music from U2.

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow

It is highly appropriate that the cyberpunk founding father William Gibson was one of the people who reviewed Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (entire e-book available for free download, print for sale), writing that it's "Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar—a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)." EST has a similar rhythm of storytelling and ability to include the reader in the rational and emotional life of the protagonist as the Neuromancer, disseminating lucid cultural and deconstructivist commentary along the way.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I’d escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: “What is the theme of this story?”

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you rather be smart or happy?”

While Gibson's book and related works served as introduction to a host of almost entirely new visual concepts, such as virtual reality interface used for data surfing, accessible by physical jacking in into the network (later reused in the Matrix), Doctorow's book builds upon experiences of most readers, most of whom come with a history of using textual internet communications, providing a feeling of familiarity to readers who have used chat channels, esp. IRC.

Classic Dune and other SF Games Available for Download

Abandonware website Abandonia offers a delightful selection of classic computer games, including many finger-eaching science fiction titles. Towering among their peers both in terms of the media and the genre are two Dune-inspired games, the adventure-strategy Dune (I), and the strategy Dune II.

The first Dune game (1992) is based on the David Lynch's movie interperation, and combined elements of adventure in which the only way to advance in the game is solving problems pointed out by other characters, and strategy - moving troops and resources using a full-scale map of the planet. It features graphics that look good even on modern computers, and solid level of gameplay.


Dune II (1992) has important position in real time strategy (RTS) genre history. It features one of the first sucessful execution of many of the basic principles of the genre, including "production" of soldiers through building various structures.

Other Dune-based games exist, but failed to provide similar impact to these two.

Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson

Melancholy Elephants (full text) is a powerful short story by Spider Robinson from the book with the same name, is worth reading by all interested in workings of modern economy, intellectual property and copyrights. It relates some principal concerns in both enterntaining and intellectually stimulating manner.

She struggled to get back on the rails. "Well, it takes a lot less than that to equal `infinity' in most minds. For millions of years we looked at the ocean and said, `That is infinite. It will accept our garbage and waste forever.' We looked at the sky and said, `That is infinite: it will hold an infinite amount of smoke.' We like the idea of infinity. A problem with infinity in it is easily solved. How long can you pollute a planet infinitely large? Easy: forever. Stop thinking.

"Then one day there are so many of us that the planet no longer seems infinitely large.

"So we go elsewhere. There are infinite resources in the rest of the solar system, aren't there? I think you are one of the few people alive wise enough to realize that there are not infinite resources in the solar system, and sophisticated enough to have included that awareness in your plans."

Take note: it's not about climate crisis, but about limits to human creativity. Creative Commons addresses some of the issues from the story.