The author of this novel works at Magic Leap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
111–120 of 173 posts
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#112This is actually part of the plot of the movie (Three Days of the Condor) and book (Six days of the Condor). The protagonist works at a CIA site where they read basically everything released and break down the plots to see if it has any strategic value and/or state secrets.
If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness) available to the corporations able to afford it.
I'd also say that I think this might be an amusing reversal of the old mantra: Ideas have no intrinsic value. This business is pretty much about the expression of ideas. Maybe they have value because they are writing them down and marketing them.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iain Banks is the kind of writer who wouldn't take military funding. If you don't care, and encourage initiatives like these, you will never get it.
I don't know...based on his writing I'm guessing that under special circumstances he might.
Sorry to break it to you but he passed away 4 years ago. :(
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#114I honestly don't care if there is a "sinister" purpose behind the good scifi I've read. Fund the next Iain banks please. In fact - throw me $50k to live for a year and you've got yourself a book - or I can at least guarantee some words on pages mentioning spaceships / robots, etc.
Speaking of whom - a friend and I were the other day wondering Just Why On Earth none of his SciFi appears to have been optioned for conversion to other media. I can imagine scope, complexity and presumably huge budget leaving prospective optioners with slightly soiled breeks, but all the same — not even a hope of one of the tales in The State of the Art?
[deleted]
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iain Banks is the kind of writer who wouldn't take military funding. If you don't care, and encourage initiatives like these, you will never get it.
I don't know...based on his writing I'm guessing that under special circumstances he might.
Those SC drones can be quite convincing after all...
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#116I honestly don't care if there is a "sinister" purpose behind the good scifi I've read. Fund the next Iain banks please. In fact - throw me $50k to live for a year and you've got yourself a book - or I can at least guarantee some words on pages mentioning spaceships / robots, etc.
Speaking of whom - a friend and I were the other day wondering Just Why On Earth none of his SciFi appears to have been optioned for conversion to other media. I can imagine scope, complexity and presumably huge budget leaving prospective optioners with slightly soiled breeks, but all the same — not even a hope of one of the tales in The State of the Art?
Same question for a ton of science fiction and fantasy. Some things that could be excellent on the silver screen, or as a television series:
• Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser".
I've not seen anything indicating anyone has ever even started development on a movie for this.
• Richard and Wendy Pini's "Elfquest".
Warner Brothers announced this in 2008, but canned it because they thought it might compete with another project of theirs, "The Hobbit".
• Larry Niven's Known Space series.
One Known Space short story made it to TV: "The Soft Weapon" was adapted to the Star Trek universe and became the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Slaver Weapon", with Mr. Spock taking the place of Nessus the Puppeteer.
Ringworld has been in planning as a movie or miniseries at least three separate times, but never got past development.
• Anne McCaffrey's Pern series.
This actually got so far as casting and set building, and was within a few days of starting shooting for a pilot for a TV series for Warner Brothers Network, but when the showrunner presented the final pilot script to Warner Brothers for approval, they sent it back with so many changes it no longer resembled Pern (the changes have been described as turning it into something like a cross between Buffy and Xena). The showrunner, Ronald D. Moore, was a fan of the books and quit rather than accept the changes, and the project died.
There have been a couple of announcements since then, but as far as I know none ever went past announcing hiring a screenwriter and maybe an executive producer and then never being heard from again.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit rich. He advocated retreating from the Euro when Greece essentially had obligations that it could never repay (obligations created by a corrupt previous government that arguably were unconscionable).
Well actually he never did, and that's the problem. If he had, we'd at least know his plan. But all he did was taking a gamble that went on and on for months dragging the economy to the bottom in the meantime. There was no planning for exiting the Euro, nothing at all. Just random thoughts here and there and a lot of bs talk. For example, the committee that was exploring the consequences of leaving the Euro and how t…
I've read all of your comments in this thread and you have a huge gap in your factual understanding. You should really just stop commenting as you're spreading outright falsehoods in some cases.
Varoufakis didn't have the final say on if Greece left the Euro. It has been quite public that he disagrees with a lot about what unfolded, including the decision to remain given the outcome of negotiations.
The idea that people were clueless about what would happen to Greece if Greece left the Euro is also ridiculous. Plenty of economists, in addition to him, opined on this matter. No one has argued that Greece would be instantly more well-off, but that they would be better off over the long run given their set of problems.
There have been efforts to try to use Varoufakis as a scapegoat for what happened, even though the crisis existed before he came into power, and Greece's situation is too complex for one person to take the blame.
Tsipras received support from the people during the 2015 referendum on the bailout. People overwhelmingly rejected the bailout. Tsipras balked and didn't follow through even though he could argue a public mandate.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully they don't come to the conclusion that "rebooting" is the best way to solve the problem.
It's ok just because C-173 got Cronenberged there are still plenty of dimensions left. Sometimes rebooting is the only option.
Bit of a nitpick, but it's actually [C-137](http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Dimension_C-137)
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#119Companies commissioning stories has gone on for a long time.
For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American".
Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly:
> Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe
Asimov write the story "2430 A.D." about a world where Priestly's nightmare had come true. (The title comes from his estimate of when human population at its current growth rate would reach the point where the Earth had so many people that there were no resources left for non-human animals).
The funny thing about this story is that "Think" rejected it, because they wanted a story that refuted the quotation. So Asimov wrote another story, "The Greatest Asset", that refuted Priestly, and sent that to "Think".
"Think" then decided they liked the first story better and ran "2430 A.D."!
I'm pretty sure that there was at least one other similar case with Asimov.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#120Based on the article about Neil Stephenson that was posted here not long ago I'd been thinking along these lines, didn't realize someone already made a business out of it. Interesting.
Neal Stephenson is working at Magic Leap (an augmented reality company) now. I think it actually makes a lot of sense. If a product manager's main job is to define product vision, this guy has a 25 year head start thinking about it!
Yup, mentioned in the article I referenced and linked below. Sounds like he got a lot of offers but ML finally made him one that made sense.