News for May 2010

Neal Stephenson, the American author of Anathem, and the Cryptonomicon (amongst others) has begun to create a collaborative experiment in 21st century publishing with renowned author Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo and others.

This experiment, titled "The Mongoliad" is a serialised story that is...

A truly historic achievement, for the first time in history Artificial life has been created by man. Researchers led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California have managed to construct a bacterium's "genetic software" (called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0) and transplanted it into a...

33 years ago (August 20, 1977), NASA launched Voyager 2 out into space, the probe was intended as both a time capsule and an attempt to contact Alien intelligence. To this end Voyager 2 carried a Golden Record that contained a voice message in 55 languages welcoming any Alien it may encounter in the vastness of...

Angry Robots break away from human masters!, you heard it right, those ever so angry robots have split from their human masters over at HarperCollins UK and are now independent Robots, backed by experts Osprey Publishing.

They will continue to plot and scheme from their Nottingham lair and will still...

Google has gone one step closer to it's monetizing plans for all those millions of books the company has so far digitized. "Google Editions" will be non-platform specific and will enable customers to download to a variety of devices.

It must be said that Google does have a vast library of literature at it's disposal, over 12...

There is a great post over at the photoshop tutorials website PSD TUTS which showcases 40 outstanding Scifi concept artworks.

Featuring some breath-taking images by some very talented artists, it's well worth a look:

Beyond Cylons and...

It has been announced that the late Philip K Dick's memoirs are finally to be published in two full volumes. The Exegesis is essentially a collection of Philip's hand written notes which include his infamous visions, his ideas on religion and what the visions could have meant along with comments...

Ringturn, the science fiction novel of off-world human colonisation by the talented writer John C Mawson has won the April 2010 People's Book Prize.

The People's Book Prize is a national competition that aims to discover talented authors and is voted for entirely by members of the public.

The...

This years winner of the esteemed Phillip K Dick Award is for the novel "Bitter Angels" by the novelist "Sarah Zettel" who first burst onto the literary scene with the 1996 novel "Reclamation". Since then she has seen a number of novels published with 2 complete series (Isavalta and Camelot) along with a number of single volume...

Darth Vader, the ex Jedi knight / Sith Lord and father of Luke and Leia Skywalker is amongst Star Wars characters who have signed up with the GPS manufacturer Tom Tom to provide their voice for the in car GPS systems. Other characters to take part include Han Solo, C3PO and Yoda.

You can see a video of Darth record his voice for the part here, and believe me it's hilarious:

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