SO YOU WANT TO WRITE TEH SCIENCE FICTIONS

ITEM: io9 has an interesting poll asking one of the great literary questions of our time: Which mainstream author do you wish would write science fiction?

It’s an interesting question, as some of the better sci-fi ever written has been from authors you don’t usually find in the SF section of Borders (Kurt Vonnegut, William S Burroughs, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jonathan Letham, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, etc).

Granted, it depends on what you consider to be sci-fi (space operas, alt.histories, post-apocalypse, speculative fiction, etc), or possibly even what one means by “mainstream author”. (Bestseller? Popular? John Grisham? Jackie Collins? Nicholas Sparks? Slice-of-life historical novels?)

My personal view is: fuck genres. Whatever purpose they might have once served, these days they are nothing more than bullshit marketing categories. The fact that Michal Crichton’s books are still in the “general fiction” section when he’s been writing sci-fi for most of his career is more than ample evidence of this. And I’d pit a “genre” writer like Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman or Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson against respected “mainstream” writers like Mitch Albom, Ian McEwan, Annie Proulx or whoever.

Anyway, of io9’s choices, I’ve never read any of the nominated authors, though David Sedaris is the one I’m most likely to read at some point in the future. As for my own choices, the only ones I can think of are the ones who are no longer alive, and would probably have zero interest in SF anyway, though if, say, Bukowski had given it a shot, it could have been fun. Alcoholic layabouts on Neptune – that sort of thing.

As for living authors, I dunno. Tom Wolfe (Charlotte Simmons, Eager Young Space Cadet)? Gabriel Garcia Marquez (The Space Captain In His Labrynth)? James Ellroy (Mars Confidential)? Carl Hiassen (can’t think of a title, but it’d be about greedy property developers raping the Martian environment to build condos)?

Maybe Kinky Friedman would be fun. He’d probably call it Jews In Space.

Ride the silver rocket,

This is dF

THANKS TO SCIENCE, YOU ARE NOW TWO STEPS CLOSER TO HOT ROBOT SEX

Two bits of news for those of you still hoping to have yr very own replicant sex toy before you die:

ITEM: Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber that is able to conduct electricity well, paving the way for robots with stretchable "e-skin" that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material is made by grinding carbon nanotubes, or tube-shaped carbon molecules, with an ionic liquid and adding it to rubber. Carbon nanotubes often bunch up together but the millimetre-long tubes coupled with the ionic liquid can be uniformly dispersed in rubber to realise both high conductivity and flexibility.

ITEM: Scientists at the University of Reading have unveiled “Gordon”, the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Taken from rat foetuses.

Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons. Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre array of 60 electrodes. This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Go science!

Yr plastic fantastic pal,

This is dF