Best SF Sites on GeoCities
Posted on October 26th, 2009 by admin
The science fiction blog IO9 has compiled a list of the 38 greatest science fiction sites on Yahoo GeoCities, information that will be completely useless after the site is shutdown today:
Geocities had a fantastic DIY sensibility that encouraged absolutely anybody to put up a website. And people used it to upload articles from their old fanzines, and create sites on incredibly niche topics, like all the different versions of the Fourth Doctor’s scarf we saw on Doctor Who, or the history of obscure TV shows. Nowadays, people would probably start blogs instead — but it’s hard to keep a blog about Tom Baker’s scarf going for terribly long. …
Anyway, we searched through Geocities in its last remaining moments, and pulled up some of our favorite sites that cover obscure or odd topics, plus a few of the silliest. What are your favorites that you’ll miss when it’s gone?
Since the closure of GeoCities was announced in April, digital archivist Jason Scott has been working desperately to save as much of it as possible. “This is fifteen years and decades of man-hours of work that you’re destroying, blowing away because it looks better on the bottom line,” he writes in a blistering denunciation of Yahoo executives.
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Free eBook: An Oblique Approach
Posted on October 25th, 2009 by admin
The 1996 science fiction novel An Oblique Approach by Eric Flint and David Drake is available for free reading in a variety of eBook formats from the Baen Free Library. The book is the first in the Belisarius series, which puts the sixth century Byzantine general of that name in the middle of a war between two future societies:
In northern India the Malwa have created an empire of unexampled evil. Guided or possessed by an intelligence from beyond time, with new weapons, old treachery, and an implacable will to power, the Malwa will sweep over the whole Earth. Only three things stand between the Malwa and their plan of eternal domination: the empire of Rome in the East, Byzantium; a crystal with vision; and a man named Belisarius, the greatest commander Earth has ever known.
Books 2 through 4 in the series also can be read at the Free Library:
In the Heart of Darkness (1998)
Destiny’s Shield (1999)
Fortune’s Stroke (2000)
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Scientists Give Flies False Memories
Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by admin
A story in the Oct. 16 issue of the Cell scientific journal sounds like a premise for a science fiction writer. Scientists at the University of Oxford have figured out how to implant false memories in the brains of flies:
“Flies have the ability to learn, but the circuits that instruct memory formation were unknown,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford. “We were able to pin the essential component down to 12 cells. It’s really remarkable resolution.