Parece que cada vez que busco uma ideia nova para minha macrossociedade  de minha trilogia encontro obras correlatas, mas com visões diferentes daquela que busco trazer a minha literatura. Ontem mesmo estava traçando algumas linhas sobre o que quero para meu Universo literário e hoje, saltando de um link a outro, chego a esse escritor, Alexei Panshin, e sua obra Rito de Passagem (ou o Trote, em tradução livre) que já ganhou um prêmio Hugo por sua humanidade vivendo em naves e comercializando com humanos em colônias. Mais um para minha lista de leituras...

 Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage (Fairwood Press) is one of those books that has compulsive readability. It’s about Mia, a girl growing up on a space ship. Earth has been destroyed and the Ships, which were built to take colonies from Earth to habitable planets, now cycle between the colonies bartering information for material goods. The colonies are much more desperate and primitive than the Ships. The people on the Ships barely regard the colonists as human, and refer to them as “mudeaters.”  All fourteen-year-olds on the ships have to spend a month surviving on a colony planet as a Trial, a rite of passage, before being seen as adult. This is the story of Mia growing up and doing this, it’s also the story of her questioning the things she initially considers axiomatic about the way the universe works.

This is a book that ought to be old fashioned and isn’t.

See more: http://www.tor.com/2009/08/16/growing-up-for-real-alexei-panshins-rite-of-passage/

http://sciencefictionhyperdrive.blogspot.com.br/2011/04/review-of-rite-of-passage-by-alexei.html

Playing Human in Octavia Butler’s Imago

Erika Nelson

This post marks my third and final visit to Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. I’ve written about colonization, desire, transformation and negotiation in Dawn and Adulthood Rites. Imago ups the ante on all these, raising questions about identity and the performed self.

The human-Oankali breeding program begun a century earlier with Lilith and the events of Dawn reaches a critical turning point in Imago. To everyone’s surprise, one of Lilith’s hybrid children enters its adolescent metamorphosis indicating that it will become ooloi, the third sex. Jodahs is the first ooloi with genes from both species. Uncontrolled, flawed ooloi have the capacity to do massive genetic damage to everything they touch, and an ooloi with a human side poses even greater danger. Lilith and her family move to the deep woods to be isolated during Jodahs’ metamorphosis, awaiting possible exile on the Oankali ship orbiting Earth. Jodahs gains the ability to regrow limbs and change shape. But without human mates it’s unable to control its changes, and there is no chance of finding human mates on Earth before being exiled. Jodahs becomes isolated and silent. Beginning to lose its sense of self, it changes erratically with the weather and environment. Aaor, Jodahs’ closest sibling, follows suit, becoming ooloi. It then transforms into a sea-slug-like creature and nearly physically dissolves in its loneliness.

See more: http://www.tor.com/2009/10/26/playing-human-in-octavia-butlers-lemgimagolemg/

Infelizmente, para a maioria dos brasileiros essa literatura está inacessível, visto que não temos tradução para o português e não vejo interesse em um horizonte a curto prazo de editoras e "publishers" em lançar por aqui...

Quem quiser adquirir em inglês, aqui tem um link para a compra do livro: http://octaviabutler.org/2010/06/imago/

Erica Verrillo has written seven books and published five. She doesn't know why anyone with an ounce of self-preservation would ever want to publish. But, if you insist on selling your soul to the devil, learn how to do it right: marketing, literary agents, book contracts, book promotion, editors, rejections, pitching your book, how to get reviews, and ... most important of all ... everything she did wrong. - See more: http://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com.br/2014/08/agents-looking-for-science-fiction-and.html

Para refletir e rir de nós mesmos:

Link: http://rinkworks.com/fnovel/

This article comes to The Purple Crayon nearly two years after it was first published in Children's Writer, but the conditions it describes still exist. The only point I want to add is to address whether or not the Harry Potter phenomenon has had an effect on children's publishers. Most will tell you that it hasn't. They either like or don't like science fiction and fantasy. Maybe so, but they are more likely to be willing to offer sizable advances for "properties" (usually presented by agents or by UK publishers) that are perceived as being potential best sellers. I've seen published reports of several in the past year, involving sales of trilogies or other small series for advances of hundreds of thousands or in one case of over a million dollars. That didn't happen before HP. Of course, for the average writer, not much has changed, but for someone who has created a truly exciting and original work, the good news is that science fiction and fantasy are now considered to be capable of reaching a wide audience.  

More: http://www.underdown.org/sffantasy.htm

SFWA is a professional organization for authors of science fiction, fantasy and related genres. Esteemed past members include Isaac Asimov, Anne McCaffrey, Ray Bradbury, and Andre Norton.

Link para o site da SFWA: 
http://www.sfwa.org/

Segue link para a resenha em vídeo do livro O Planeta dos Macacos, de Pierre Boulle, feito pela blogueira Eduarda Menezes.

http://www.book-addict.com/2015/06/video-resenha-o-planeta-dos-macacos-de-pierre-boulle.html

http://www.ideafixa.com/o-apocalipse-de-10-anos-que-inspirou-insterestellar/

Sempre fui um grande fã da história do Império Britânico, em particular do período vitoriano até fins da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Em minha obra literária, que em breve finalizarei, uso o mecanismo de realidades paralelas, onde o Império da Rainha não ruiu com o final da Grande Guerra. Hoje, descobri que não sou o único que pensa dessa forma e divulgo aqui uma síntese criada pelo autor Alfie Heugh e postada nos sites http://www.scifiideas.com/    e http://thisdayinalternatehistory.blogspot.co.uk/

I recently received an email from new SciFi Ideas subscriber Alfie Heugh detailing an interesting alternate history scenario. Alfie has created a timeline of alternate events, beginning in 1914, which sees the British Empire not only maintain its place as a world-leading superpower but also become a leader in space exploration and colonization, advancing mandkind’s technological development beyond the level we currently enjoy.

Perhaps this more properly belongs on an alternate history website – of which there are many great examples (Alternate History Weekly Update, alternatehistory.com, This Day in Alternate History; check them out if you’re interested in this kind of thing) – but I thought it would be interesting to share it here anyway and get your opinions on whether or not this chain of events is plausible.

Here’s Alfie’s alternate history timeline:

1914: Britain warns Germany not to attack Belgium or any other nation, Germany is aware and thus England never gets involved in the war, however they declare war on the Ottoman Empire, whilst signing a non-aggression pact with the rest of the central powers.
More (...)
http://www.scifiideas.com/sfi/britannia-rules-the-stars-an-alternate-history-timeline/

Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. The Lomekwi 3 knappers, with a developing understanding of stone’s fracture properties, combined core reduction with battering activities. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, we propose for it the name ‘Lomekwian’, which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record.


More: (...)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature14464.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6827/fig_tab/410433a0_F2.html

In a leap for robot development, the MIT researchers who built a robotic cheetah have now trained it to see and jump over hurdles as it runs—making this the first four-legged robot to run and jump over obstacles autonomously.
More (...) http://phys.org/news/2015-05-cheetah-robot-video.html