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Think Weirder: The Year's Best SciFi Ideas
- pelagicAustral 1y agoSadly, no PDF version available... meh...
- mojoe 1y agoemail me at joe@thinkweirder.com and I'll get you a PDF!
- pelagicAustral 1y agodone! =)
- shinymarmot 1y agoBought a copy - unfortunately that site only has a link to an Amazon DRM version. Link to purchase a DRM free epub is available here: https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/think-weirder-is-released.html https://compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/think-weirder-is-...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- shinymarmot 1y agoHa - immediately taken down. It's fine to not want folks to use the discount anymore, but please provide an option besides renting from Amazon.
- mojoe 1y agoPublisher here, this link still works for a discounted DRM-free epub: https://thinkweirder.kit.com/products/think-weirder-volume-1?promo=OGSUPPORT1 https://thinkweirder.kit.com/products/think-weirder-volume-1...
- shinymarmot 1y agoAh sorry, I checked the second time from Firefox with tracking protection on, which just returns a blank page. Works fine on Chrome/Safari.
- atlasunshrugged 1y agoJust ordered, thanks for sharing!
- hn_acc1 1y agoCool. In for one.
- Loughla 1y agoPerfect. Thanks!
- criddell 1y agoWhy include DRM in your Amazon ebook? I know Tor's books are DRM-free on Amazon and it would be nice to see more publishers do the same.
- mojoe 1y agoI did not. It should be DRM-free on Amazon as well!
- scrollop 1y agoIs this in epub? Doesn't say. EDIT: Confirmed it is epub (bought it). 385 p
- dupdup 1y agoAfter purchase I am able to send it to my amazon fire tablet using send to amazon https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle
- Semaphor 1y agoIncluded in kindle unlimited, I think that's the most expensive KU book I've seen at 8.68€ normal price
- Animats 1y agoNever heard of any of those authors. Is this the year's best ideas, or just the ones for which an unknown aggregator could get republication rights?
- IvyMike 1y agoI'm so happy that you get to discover Greg Egan. If you can find a copy of Axiomatic, start there.
- gsf_emergency_4 1y agoGreg Egan? I've heard of Lance, another scientist-writer of the same mold https://www.bayviewmagazine.com/article/2024/06/write-what-you-care-about https://www.bayviewmagazine.com/article/2024/06/write-what-y...
- KingFelix 1y agoEgan has some pretty awesome books, I've read Permutation City and Axiomatic both pretty great.
- mojoe 1y agoHi, I'm the editor, I chose the stories. I read 391 short science fiction stories published last year (all the stories in the big science fiction magazines and a few smaller ones), and selected these sixteen. None of the authors I reached out to refused to sell me reprint rights, so there was no bottleneck there. I'm a software engineer who enjoys near-future concept-driven science fiction, so if that's not your thing then you might not agree with my choices. The stories I look for are the ones where I think "wow, this contains ideas that reflect something interesting about reality".
- micheles 1y agoI like far-future concept-driven science fiction, is there something for me too?
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- dylan604 1y agoWhat's up with the ? after the author's name in the little blurbs about each story? Is the author of something being published really in question?
- mojoe 1y agoAre you referring to this? "How will it use these memories, while simultaneously protecting its young charge, in THE LARK ASCENDING by ELEANNA CASTROIANNI?" This is just a rhetorical device, I think it's called a 'hook question'. It's probably unclear due to the distracting colors and capitalization.
- davnicwil 1y agoI bought a copy on launch and working my way through. There's some really excellent stuff in here, fiction is a great way to analyse and get thinking about how the near-ish future could look, and that's what the theme of this collection is.
- dylan604 1y agoThat's what makes Black Mirror so compelling. It's not flights of fancy with things like FTL traveling through space. It's taking slight twists to the darker side of where our tech leaders are taking us. At least someone is thinking these things through to the end even if our teach leaders are only thinking through to the $$$$. Too bad these stories are never enough to slow things down and used as "oooh, let's not let our tech come to that".
- asacrowflies 1y agoYeah a lot like older sci Fi works I think we won't take the warnings. Glad we aren't completely blind to it tho. Remind me of the "1984 was not a manual" memes
- jandrese 1y agoThe meme about the Torment Nexus continues to be worryingly relevant in the modern world.
- fragmede 1y agoOH that's the fantasy that people like watching that show under! I hate that show's premise because reality is depressing enough, my mind easily conjures up shit going wrong, and (as an adult) I don't need a TV show giving me more nightmare fuel. Plus, that one episode where we all wear glasses that let you delete people by not seeing them seems like a instruction manual to tech giants working on AR glasses. Apple airpod noise cancellation already does this for audio, Apple Vision or Meta glasses doing that for visual pollution seems not that far behind. It would be nice to walk around the neighborhood and not see any billboards. Not seeing people that wrote wrong things on Twitter seems like it's just a GitHub repo away.
- everyone 1y agocool
- throwanem 1y agoGood to see a couple stories here I first read in Clarkesworld! If you're a fan of the old-school SF magazine as form, there's no better place to go lately, in my view, and Neil's editorial taste is excellent - if you like this anthology, you'll enjoy the magazine, also. Take a look! https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/
- mojoe 1y agoThank you for posting a link to Neil's magazine! I think he's the best short-form editor working in SFF today.
- shawn_w 1y agoI occasionally encounter a story in Clarkesworld that I don't click with and skip over, but most of them range from like to love (I really hope The Apologists¹ from this month's issue wins some awards). Even though he makes each issue free to read online, I've been buying it Kobo every month for around a year now to help support the magazine. Too bad the platform doesn't seem to support subscriptions so I don't have to manually buy each issue. [1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson_11_25/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson_11_25/
- TheCoelacanth 1y agoIMO, if you like every single story that a magazine publishes, the editor is playing it too safe and not doing their job properly. The biggest advantage of short fiction magazines over longer form is that it's a lower stakes way to try out new ideas and ways of telling stories and to expose readers to new authors. Doing that means taking some risks and publishing some stories that won't always land with readers.
- astroflection 1y agoA few non-Amazon links for you: https://www.alibris.com/Think-Weirder-Volume-1-The-Years-Best-Science-Fiction-Ideas-Joe-Stech/book/57169817 https://www.alibris.com/Think-Weirder-Volume-1-The-Years-Bes... https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/think-weirder-volume-1-the-year-s-best-science-fiction-ideas-9781949787023/new https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/think-weirde...
- ortusdux 1y agoReminds me of The Best American Nonrequired Reading series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_American_Nonrequired_Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_American_Nonrequired_... Ironically, the 5th ed was required reading in my ENG 101 course. It included a collection of Onion headlines. I will never forget "CIA realizes they have been using black highlighters all these years."
- soupfordummies 1y agoOh man, I used to love this series. Weird that this comment just jogged my memory that I dreamed last night they brought it back.
- robocat 1y agoA shame the front image is so irrationally greebled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble SciFi art continues its strange stylistic journey. Makes me want to look through my old SciFi art books. Edit: The Greeble article refers to the art term diapering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering
- octaane 1y agoI agree, but just a heads up: the front images for most scifi novels these days (and for the past few decades) have largely been out of the hands of the writer. The publishing house pretty much unilaterally decides on the cover for marketing reasons.
- robocat 1y agoAuthor said they paid for the cover art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45879213 (of course that doesn't mean they chose it). I actually like the art - but I'm somewhat eclectic.
- mojoe 1y agoJust confirming that yes, I chose the art. It's hard to please everyone with a project like this, I'm glad you like it!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- crooked-v 1y agoI'm a bit sad they only have an ebook on, and only link to, Amazon, and not somewhere more ethical, like Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/p/books/think-weirder-volume-1-the-year-s-best-science-fiction-ideas-joe-stech/cacd264ab9ead96e?ean=9781949787023&next=t https://bookshop.org/p/books/think-weirder-volume-1-the-year...).
- raincole 1y agoI know this site is full of ads, but isn't this a little bit too much? It's just a link to buy a book on Amazon. At least pretend to have hacker spirit, wrap it as "how I use {insert open source book layout software} to make a book" and sell DRM-free epub or something. Where is the usual HN hatred towards DRM, Amazon and copyright...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y agoThere has been a gap in the market ever since Gardner Dozois died and "The Year's Best Science Fiction" ceased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year%27s_Best_Science_Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year%27s_Best_Science_Fict...
- shawn_w 1y agoI've been enjoying The Long List anthology series put out by Diabolical Plots. Stories that were nominated for a Hugo but didn't get enough of them to make the final ballot. It's up to 9 volumes. https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/books/ https://www.diabolicalplots.com/support/books/
- mojoe 1y agoI'm the editor, and I actually used LaTeX to typeset the book and wrote my own Python software to keep track of all the story metadata while I was evaluating stories over the course of the last year, I should write a post about that :)
- dang 1y agoPlease do! and email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you submit it to Hacker News.
- oraphalous 1y agoI bought the book - looks good! Would be keen to know which magazines they were originally published in. I feel you should include those references in the book (forgive me if I've missed them.)
- BrenBarn 1y agoVery cool. I often wish for the ability to do something like this but with slightly friendlier GUI tools. In particular I long for a visual tool that has all the power and convenience of a spreadsheet, but supports other backends (like an SQL db or some directory-tree structure like in this post), with well-defined mechanisms for smoothly translating between them. I've looked at a few of the "database management" tools like DBeaver but it's hard to find anything that's as fluid as a spreadsheet.
- HardwareLust 1y agoLooks great, early reviews are excellent! Wish-listed for sure.