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Looking for a way to jazz up your used book sales?  Try the Biblio-Mat, which promises to convert $2 into a randomly selected title from its inventory.  Genius.

Really big stuff, in fact.  Like 20 km high towers into space big.  At least that’s what Neal Stephenson is up to with his amazing Hieroglyph project.  io9‘s article on the potential impact of a massive stairway to the stars led me to “Innovation Starvation“, an essay by Mr. Stephenson in which he derides science fiction – his own chosen genre – as being dreadfully lazy for a generation. Some choice quotes that sum up the gist of his argument:

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age.

io9 further quotes Stephenson from another interview as saying “Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization busied itself with figuring out the Internet.  While this point is certainly likely to be true, it does provide some hope.  Not only does the Internet enable us to access all of the optimism of innovative science fiction thinking of the past (plug: and even take a class about it online), it also immediately connects visionaries like Stephenson with the young engineers in Israel, Finland and Japan who are itching to build something really big.  (There was no Kickstarter when Clarke pitched the space elevator, after all…)

And that’s not such a small thing, is it?

Having played my fair share of text-based adventure games as a kid, I can tell you the joy that was getting to the occasional point when a crazy-awful illustration would pop onto the screen after multiple pages of story whizzed past.  And when we progressed to mostly picture based games, the illustrations were an ever-present fact of storytelling, even if they didn’t really look all that fantastic.

Fast forward to now and we have io9 presenting us with haunting animated gifs in the style of vintage computer games by Uno Moralez.  It’s like Zen & The Art of The Macintosh gone spooky.

I have always loved listening to music while I read.  Every once in awhile I find an album that perfectly matches up with a book when I do this, like Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson and El Oso by Soul Coughing (especially “St. Louise is Listening“).  And sometimes a novel is designed to be a complement to a record from the very start (much to my delight).  Poe’s Haunted and her brother, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is the most notable and creepiest of these matches.  So I’m always listening with a keen ear for synchronicities between the words I’m reading and the sounds with which I’m filling in the background.

While reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, I kept longing for a soundtrack to accompany the weirdly stilted world of Aomame, Tengo, Ushikawa, the Dowager, Fuka-Eri and Tamaru.  As it would happen, Purity Ring’s “Fineshrine” popped onto my iTunes and perfectly captured the mood – and exploding ribs – of Murakami’s crazy book.  ”I bet I could dig up enough ethereal, oddball music to do a soundtrack justice,” I thought – and then quickly forgot.  It’s Tumblr that should be credited with making the idea re-emerge and stick, though.  The image above made its way into my infinite scroll and reminded me so much of Eriko Fukado that I recalled my playlist plan as I recognized how perfect it would be as artwork.

So here we are, 1Q84‘s musical accompaniment:

1. Sinfonietta “I. Allegretto” – Leoš Janáček
2. “This is Where the Road Belongs” – Fol Chen
3. “Everything is Wrong” – Blonde Redhead
4. “Night Sight” – Air
5. “Fineshrine” – Purity Ring
6. “Carry” – Zambri
7. “Kill Me” – The Golden Filter
8. “Iron” – Woodkid
9. “The Modern Things” – High Places
10. “Moonlight” – Ruby Frost
11. “When I Grow Up” – First Aid Kit
12. “10,000 Claps” – Phantogram
13. “I’m In Here” – Sia
14. “Gleypa okkur” – Ólafur Arnalds
15. “0078h” – M83
16. “Inch of Dust” – Future Islands
17. “Noise on the Line” – Darkness Falls
18. “Perfection” – Oh Land
19. “Realize It’s Not the Sun” – Hooray for Earth
20. “Ekki múkk” – Sigur Rós
21. “know the way (outro)” – Grimes
22. “It’s Only a Paper Moon” – Lester Young

Download the entire playlist for your very own listen right now.

Just as when we were on the cusp of cyberpunk and didn’t know it, I’m hoping now for another new breed of writers, people who can craft drive-by speculations that leave us gasping with surprise.

My love of all things 80s and 90s artsy/techie of course has bred in me a fascination with the ethos of the cyberpunk.  It doesn’t help that I’m also a Stephenson junkie and a Gibson supporter…  Paolo Bacigalupi’s “How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi” was a delightful find in the latest issue of Wired magazine.  (And it’s available to read for free online now, too.)

Perhaps not too surprising since the staff at Wired’s always been on the cyberpunk bandwagon, though.  Probably actually helping turn its tenets into our reality.

And there’s a Kickstarter pitch to prove it:

Not that I’m particularly into sword-play but holy crap.  This is basically the most Stephenson-y thing ever.

The “whole” story of A Wrinkle in Time presented as a single comic page. You’re welcome.

(And thank you, io9.)

Wired titled their article about the re-emergence of an out of print Blade Runner sketchbook “Thanks, Internet” – my thoughts exactly. Enjoy all 99 pages here or at Issuu.

Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of it all, a new drug has just entered circulation a drug that whips its users back and forth across time.

io9 has news about the latest Philip K. Dick adaptation, Now Wait for Last Year.  Also in the report:  absurd hats are pondered and I’m reminded of the impending Gondry-fication of Ubik.  Hoorah!

I might just consider buying one of the lithographs from the 1969 illustrated Alice in Wonderland to which Salvador Dalí lent his talents, as pointed out by io9.  Because, you see, they look like this:

In looking up the price of a copy of the actual book (not found), I also turned up a video or three about the project:

With Xmas time just around the corner, feel free to take this post into account when considering how best to splurge on me…