Cool: December 2007 Archives

Gabriel Mckee let me know about SF Gospel's list of the 10 best SF stories about religion, which is really just advertising for his book The Gospel According to Science Fiction: From the Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier, but I'll let him off because it's quite an interesting list and I was looking for Christmas stories and this is sort of close. I've only read the Asimov story, so I can't comment on the others.

A couple of SF novels I've read that deal explicitly with religion come immediately to mind:

• A Case Of Conscience by Jame Blish, which I thought was boring.
• The Sparrow which is truly brilliant and the not quite as good Children Of God, both by Mary Doria Russell.

It should be noted that I read the The Sparrow and Children Of God before I read A Case Of Conscience which may have some affect on my opinion of the latter.

Via the StarWars.com news email, here's the top ten most popular entries in their databank, the definitive encyclopedia of Star Wars knowledge...

10. Yoda

9. Luke Skywalker

8. Obi-Wan Kenobi

7. clone troopers

6. the Empire

5. Anakin Skywalker

4. Sith

3. Darth Vader

2. lightsaber

1. the Jedi order.

Here's a handy (and very funny list) of things to look out for to check whether your child is a hacker.

I like number 4...

4. Does your child read hacking manuals?
There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.

So that's 4 of my favourite ever books, another one I've read and one I gave up reading. I'll leave it to you to guess which is which.

I just stumbled upon a whole web site full of cool vintage SF book covers.

How about a cover for I Am Legend?



Others include:

• The Body Snatchers
• City
• Donovan's Brain
• Dune
• Forbidden Planet
• Farenheit 451
• Immortality, Inc.
• I, Robot
• Little Fuzzy
• Ralph 124C 41+
• Reach For Tomorrow
• Rogue Queen
• The Sirens Of Titan
• The Stainless Steel Rat
• Utopia 14

Nice. Also a whole category of Sleaze Science Fiction covers if you want to see scantily clad people or Multi-Coloured Bunny Girls or see what the cover for a book entitled Those Sexy Saucer People looks like.

Hours of fun with the R2D2 Translator. For some reason "big dumb object" was a very long set of bleeps.

Joe at FPI has blogged about some awesome posters...

Firstly the rather lovely Blue Sun Travel posters which are tourist posters for Serenity Valley, Persephone, Londinium, Sihnon and Miranda. All destinations from the Firefly / Serenity universe.




Secondly the very funny How to spot a Cylon poster. I like number 2: Red Dress + glowing spine == trouble.

Nice.