Stories of the future - science fiction, foresight and the future

I’ve just completed a unit on Sustainability as part of my masters in Foresight. We had a fantastic lecture from Frank Fisher, who is a published writer and is involved at Swinburne’s National Centre for Sustainability. Frank’s a keen cycler. I am a keen cycler. The following quote from his writing was one that shifted my thinking on what it means to be passed by a car on a hill.

Imagine a cyclist with enough insight to recognise that her apparently slow progress from one urban location to another is actually some three or four times faster than the speedy DODOs (driver only driver owned car) whizzing past her. To do this she would have to be aware of the time drivers spend earning the right to access (i.e. purchase) their cars and that that time must be factored into the calculation of their speed. In most cases therefore, DODOs in an urban context are the wrong messages!”

Frank Fisher. ‘Imag(in)ing Sustainability: metaphorical change for sustainability’, JVAEE, 30, 1. 2007.

The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.

The Space Telescope Science Institute announced the results of their cooperative effort with Google, Inc., to incorporate astronomical data into a browsable utility. It’s a start! And a pretty good one.

The latest version of the free Google Earth has a Sky function. Select “Switch to Sky” in the View pull down menu and Earth will disappear and become a celestial globe. All the commands and layers transform from geographical to celestial, allowing you to search for NGC objects, slew to coordinates, click to display Hubble images, and much more.

The above quote is sourced from ‘Sky & Telescope’. Read the whole article at: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/astronomyonline/9308836.html

A story is a complete dramatic action - and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience. I myself prefer to say that a story is a dramatic event that involves a person because he is a person, and a particular person - that is, because he shares in the general human condition and in some specific human situation. A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality. I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there - showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.

Flannery O’Connor, quoted from ‘Writing Short Stories’
In ‘The Art of The Short Story’ by Wendy Martin

Oh My News is a first of its kind website dedicated to ‘citizen journalism’. It is entirely written by members of the community. This represents a radical step away from conventional journalism. It’s yet another way the internet is democratizing the process of writing, editing and publishing content on line. The emergence of these types of applications is sure to shake up business. News organisations are feeling it presently, but these applications will have far reaching affects, and will shake the world’s of small and Fortune 500 companies alike.

Visit the Oh My News International site here http://english.ohmynews.com/

Visit the Wiki Entry here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OhmyNews

At Poynter you’ll find fifty ideas to improve your writing skills. Though the site is directed at journalists, these writings lessons are useful for any writer looking to build on their craft.

I particularly like the one on ‘X-RayReading’. It’s so useful to learn from other writers who have walked the path before and created ‘models’ for forms of writing.

Enjoy!

Visit Fifty Writing Tools at this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20060426003003/www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=61811/

You know, I’m not actually sure exactly what this site is about. What I do know is that within five minutes of reading through it, I found lots of nifty things to help me learn. I’d put this in the ‘rouse your curiosity and learning’ basket. A good site to visit for some quick stimulation when we need to get something new or kickstart our writing.

Visit Dumb Little Man http://www.dumblittleman.com/

The folks at Digg have created ‘Digg Labs’, a place to explore new tools that allow users to consider the popularity of peer-reviewed content. The tools are all based on visualisation techniques and provide a real-time feed with news stories from third party sites around the world. Just watching the headlines show themselves in visually innovative ways is incredible. In the sea of information that is the web, tools such as these are helping people sort and decide upon the type of stories they wish to read.

As the screenshot shows, the Digg Labs will show everything, so be careful what to read which are the most popular headlines! I guess though that’s the downfall of using the ‘most popular’ content mechanism to sort what we read!

Visit Digg Labs here http://labs.digg.com/

About TierneyLab:

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. Now a columnist for the Science Times section, Tierney previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines like Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.

With your help, he’s using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society.

Visit TierneyLab at this link: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/