"Obsolescence" with a Capital Zero

One of Vernor Vinge's many books

“The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon's fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now 'sound like science fiction' that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google.

    The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it's possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you'll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? A space elevator to the stars? Maybe I can formulate this as Walter's law – 'Any idea described in sci-fi will on a long enough timescale be made real by science.'
     The most radical prediction of science fiction is the technological singularity. As author and mathematician Vernor Vinge put it in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, 'Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.'"
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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a rose by any other name...

From: Fork in My Eye

"One summer day when I was about twelve, I complained to a friend that I couldn’t find anything interesting to read. My friend gave a little laugh and said, Come with me. Leading me to her garage, she flicked on the light, waited a moment for dramatic effect, and said, Pick.

     I was in awe. One whole wall of the garage was covered by homemade bookshelves and those shelves were stuffed to overflowing with, what I would soon discover, were science fiction paperbacks.
     'They’re my dad’s,' my friend said. 'He’s kind of a sci fi junkie. You can borrow anything you want.'"
— Fork in My Eye
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From: Museu do Cinemaxunga

"If there's one thing science fiction fans love, it's an argument. And if there's one argument they love more than all others, it's the attempt to define what science fiction actually is, and what is or isn't included in that definition.
     David Barnett set fire to the dry tinder of the genre argument recently by declaring a preference for 'sci-fi' over the generally more respectable 'SF'? But, I hear the still sane among you declare, what does this even mean? And why should
you care?
     For the ever growing army of writers, bloggers, editors, critics, academics and just plain old obsessive fans of this thing that may (or may not) be called sci-fi, there is at least some method in this madness. Each name and definition reveals a different aspect of the immense creativity sheltering within sci-fi. Or SF. Or whatever the hell it's called! So, here is a brief glossary of the various competing definitions of sci-fi. […]"
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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"... the ironic female gaze"

From: random geeking

"The Bible was written by a woman. Not all of it, just the good bits. Those fantastic old stories, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, were written by a woman living in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago as works of literature, only later co-opted to the service of religious dogma. So argues Harold Bloom in his treatise on the bible as literature, The Book of J.

     Bloom places the mysterious 'J author' at the pinnacle of the literary canon alongside Homer and Shakespeare. Seen through the ironic female gaze, God becomes less the ultimate patriarch than a petulant child sulking and raging his way through history. The Bible, with its cornucopia of talking snakes, burning bushes, seven-headed dragons, apocalyptic floods, parting seas, epic battles, tribal sagas, prophecies, miracles and magic is arguably the greatest fantasy story ever written.
     So if this most timeworn of texts was written by a woman, where in God's name are the women in today's modern myth-making?
     Everywhere, actually. Science fiction – our modern version of those ancient mythic stories – was invented by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus."
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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"We gotta get out of this place." — The Animals

From: AOL Soft

"The world of Narnia faces evil-doer but smart Lucy is here. But she as any woman wishes to be attractive everywhere, doesn't she? So, try our free download game Narnia 3 Dress Up Game and make different images for this perfect girl. Narnia 3 is famous for its gorges [sic] graphics and picturesque backgrounds. Narnia 3 Dress Up Game has the same mouthwatering artwork and thrilling backgrounds.
     Dress up the main heroine for the memorable fight! Her wardrobe is full of nice dresses for such outstanding events."

— AOL Soft
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 "The only people who hate escapism are jailers, said the essayist and Narnia author C S Lewis. A generation later, the fantasy writer Michael Moorcock revised the quip: jailers love escapism — it’s escape they can’t stand. Today, in the early years of the 21st century, escapism — the act of withdrawing from the pressures of the real world into fantasy worlds — has taken on a scale and scope quite beyond anything Lewis might have envisioned….
     As the technology of escape continues to accelerate, we’ve begun to see an eruption of fantasy into reality. The augmented reality of Google Glass, and the virtual reality of the games headset Oculus Rift (resurrected by the power of crowd-funding) present the very real possibility that our digital fantasy worlds might soon be blended with our physical world, enhancing but also distorting our sense of reality. When we can replace our own reflection in the mirror with an image of digitally perfected beauty, how will we tolerate any return to the real? Perhaps, in the end, we will find ourselves, not desperate to escape into fantasy, but desperate to escape from fantasy. Or simply unable to tell which is which."
— Damien Walter, aeon
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Buy all of C. S. Lewis's books here...

Interactive

From: Retronaut

"There's a pervasive arrogance in the approach of technologists to books. Every new wave of technology arrives with its techno-prophets, assuring us we'll no longer have to deal with those fusty old book things and their tiresome words. In the future all novels will be interactive multimedia experiences….

     We're in the process of shifting the book from paper page to digital screen, but what we actually choose to read are still chunks of text, around 100,000 words long give or take, which start at the beginning and finish at the end. No branching interactive story lines. No embedded multimedia widgets. And definitely no chance for the reader to mess it up by doing something silly. Or worse, mundane."
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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Speculative Fact

News of secret courts being introduced in the world's oldest democracy [the U.K., not Greece] should scare any rational human. The right to a public trial has survived feudalism, Henry VIII and the industrial revolution, but couldn't stand up to the forces of global capitalism. Secret courts could be an idea from Alan Moore's polemic on Thatcher's Britain, V for Vendetta (today enjoying a second life inspiring Occupy protestors and the Anonymous hacker group) or from Homeland, the latest novel from science-fiction author Cory Doctorow.
     Doctorow's 2007 young adult novel Little Brother introduced teenage readers to the writer's outspoken ideas on technology and personal freedom. The novel's title is of course a play on Big Brother, from the granddaddy of all dystopian SF, George Orwell's 1984."
— Damien Walter, The Guardian

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Buy all of Cory Doctorow's books here...