My friends Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders and Kevin Kelly have just launched a new Gawker science fiction blog called IO9: it's lewd, funny, smart and irreverent:
What Is an io9?:
io9s were marketed as cheap time machines in the 2070s. They were actually just low-grade input/output devices for the brain that tuned tachyon waves and gave users vivid images of possible futures. The things were so addictive, and drove so many people insane, that io9s were eventually outlawed. Today the word is just slang. io9ers are the early implanters who obsessively upgrade themselves with beta tech. People who tweak out on buggy brainware are sometimes said to have "gone io9." Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has another term for io9ers. He calls them rapture fuckers.
Link
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via Oblomovka)
the latest
latest episodes
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I quite like the irreverent stylings of Gawker blogs over, say, Weblogs.. which run it a bit more dry.
Just had a good read through the last few pages of i09, and it's made it into the feed. Thanks for the tip!
"Ken MacLeod has another term for io9ers. He calls them rapture fuckers."
How nice for Macleod. If you have to use the F-word to describe what sounds like Gnosis, or some other kind of spiritual high, then you probably have no respect for altered states of mind in general. Pretty ironic coming from an sf writer.
Jeff, you really don't have much knowledge of real live science fiction writers if you think it's ironic that they don't have your desired respect for altered states. How many writers do you know?
A blog needs a badly written fictional back story as much as it needs cut scenes and Happy Meal tie-ins. Interesting links though.
Hmph. Cory, your enthusiasm aside, so far the site looks like it is about less actual SF (as opposed to movies and TV) than, say, BoingBoing.
Nevertheless, I've subscribed. I'll give them a month at least.
When the hell did they launch? I thought I'd look over all their posts, and uh, so far I've hit November with no end/beginning in sight.
I know it's crazy to try and look at everything, but if they just launched, it should have been easy, right?
I want to like Gawker, except their odd comments "auditioning" policy gets in the way.
The first real posts start in September, BTW, but it's mostly just filler for a while (as they were jsut testing the system).
I have tried to like io9, but every time I go there, I get spoiled on something I am interested in. They really need to learn to keep spoilers to cuts and out of headlines. It's pretty disconcerting, and I am steering clear.