The Things (short Story)
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The Things (short Story)
"The Things" is a science fiction short story by Peter Watts (author), Peter Watts, revisiting the universe of John Carpenter's 1982 film ''The Thing (1982 film), The Thing'' (derived itself from John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?") from the viewpoint of the alien. It was first published on ''Clarkesworld'', in January 2010. Synopsis The events of ''The Thing (1982 film), The Thing'' as well as other happenings are told from the perspective of the alien, a shape-shifting sentient Biomass (ecology), biomass that can absorb and imitate other lifeforms. The alien thinks of itself as an "explorer, an ambassador, a missionary" of the biomass it consists of, the primary instinct of which is to "commune", i.e. absorb and matriculate on a cellular level with other biologies. Confused, damaged, and unfamiliar with earthly fauna, the alien eventually learns the horrifying secret of man: Humans are individuals, "thinking cancers" who do not want to be assimilated and therefore seek to ...
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Science Fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, sentient artificial intelligence, cybernetics, certain forms of immortality (like mind uploading), and the singularity. Science fiction predicted several existing inventions, such as the atomic bomb, robots, and borazon, whose names entirely match their fictional predecessors. In addition, science fiction might serve as an outlet to facilitate future scientific and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is also related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers. Science fiction, in literature, film, television, and other media, has beco ...
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Publishers Weekly
''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews. The magazine was founded by bibliographer Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ... Frederick Leypoldt in the late 1860s, and had various titles until Leypoldt settled on the name ''The Publishers' Weekly'' (with an apostrophe) in 1872. The publication was a compilation of information about newly published books, collected from publishers and from other sources by Leypoldt, for an audience of booksellers. By 1876, ''The Publishers' Weekly ...
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Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ...
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Geek's Guide To The Galaxy
''Geek's Guide to the Galaxy'' is a science fiction book podcast. History The show is produced for Wired.com and hosted by author David Barr Kirtley. It was created by Kirtley and John Joseph Adams, who served as co-host for the first hundred episodes and is currently a producer on the show. Each episode typically includes either an interview with an author or other media personality, or a moderated panel segment featuring a group of "guest geeks." Season 1 (2010) was produced for Tor.com, the website of Tor Books, a science fiction book publisher. Season 2 (2011) was produced for io9, a science fiction and futurism website owned by Gawker Media. Seasons 3–9 (2012–2018) were produced for the tech magazine ''Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...''. Referen ...
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Pulp Magazine
Pulp magazines (also referred to as "the pulps") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was wide by high, and thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid, exploitative, and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Successors of pulps include paperback books, digest magazines, and men's adventure magazines. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considere ...
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Retcon
Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which established diegetic facts in the plot of a fictional work (those established through the narrative itself) are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former. There are various motivations for applying retroactive continuity, including: * To accommodate desired aspects of sequels or derivative works which would otherwise be ruled out. * To respond to negative fan reception of previous stories. * To correct and overcome errors or problems identified in the prior work since its publication. * To change or clarify how the prior work should be interpreted. * To match reality, when assumptions or projections of the future are later proven wrong. Retcons are used by authors to increase their creative freedom, on the assumption that the changes are unimportant to the audience compared to the new story which can be tol ...
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Chad Orzel
Chad Orzel is a professor of physics and science author, noted for his books ''How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog'', which has been translated into 9 languages, and ''How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog''. Chad as a science communicator is a regular contributor on Forbes.com, on his personal website, and, through October 2017, on ScienceBlogs.com, while continuing his work as an associate professor at Union College. Background Chad was born and raised in central New York state, near Binghamton. After attending Williams College, he spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University, studying quantum mechanical effects in Bose-Einstein Condensates.''Contemporary Authors'' vol. 339, 2013. (available online as part of Gale's Literature Resource Center/ref> He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics studying laser cooling at the National Institute of Standards and Technology from the University of Maryland, College Park under Nobel Laureate William Daniel Phillips. ...
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Locus Online
''Locus: The Magazine of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field'', founded in 1968, is an American magazine published monthly in Oakland, California. It is the news organ and trade journal for the English-language science fiction and fantasy fields. It also publishes comprehensive listings of all new books published in the genres (excluding self-published). The magazine also presents the annual Locus Awards. ''Locus Online'' was launched in April 1997, as a semi-autonomous web version of ''Locus Magazine''. History Charles N. Brown, Ed Meskys, and Dave Vanderwerf founded ''Locus'' in 1968 as a news fanzine to promote the (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Originally intended to run only until the site-selection vote was taken at St. Louiscon, the 1969 Worldcon in St. Louis, Missouri, Brown decided to continue publishing ''Locus'' as a mimeographed general science fiction and fantasy newszine. ''Locus'' succeede ...
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Locus (magazine)
''Locus: The Magazine of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field'', founded in 1968, is an American magazine published monthly in Oakland, California. It is the news organ and trade journal for the English-language science fiction and fantasy fields. It also publishes comprehensive listings of all new books published in the genres (excluding self-published). The magazine also presents the annual Locus Awards. ''Locus Online'' was launched in April 1997, as a semi-autonomous web version of ''Locus Magazine''. History Charles N. Brown, Ed Meskys, and Dave Vanderwerf founded ''Locus'' in 1968 as a news fanzine to promote the (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, Massachusetts. Originally intended to run only until the site-selection vote was taken at St. Louiscon, the 1969 Worldcon in St. Louis, Missouri, Brown decided to continue publishing ''Locus'' as a mimeographed general science fiction and fantasy newszine. ''Locus'' succeede ...
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The Thing From Another World
''The Thing from Another World'', sometimes referred to as just ''The Thing'', is a 1951 American black-and-white science fiction-horror film, directed by Christian Nyby, produced by Edward Lasker for Howard Hawks' Winchester Pictures Corporation, and released by RKO Pictures. The film stars Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, and Douglas Spencer. James Arness plays The Thing; he is difficult to recognize in costume and makeup due to both low lighting and other effects used to obscure his features. ''The Thing from Another World'' is based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell (writing under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart).Warren 1982, pp. 151–163. The film's storyline concerns a U.S. Air Force crew and scientists who find, frozen in the Arctic ice, a crashed flying saucer and a humanoid body nearby. Returning to their remote research outpost with the body still in a block of ice, they are forced to defend themselves against the still al ...
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Gardner Dozois
Gardner Raymond Dozois ( ; July 23, 1947 – May 27, 2018) was an American people, American science fiction author and editing, editor. He was the founding editor of ''The Year's Best Science Fiction'' anthologies (1984–2018) and was editor of ''Asimov's Science Fiction'' magazine (1986–2004), garnering multiple Hugo Award, Hugo and Locus Awards for those works almost every year. He also won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice. He was inducted to the EMP Museum#Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Science Fiction Hall of Fame on June 25, 2011. Biography Dozois was born July 23, 1947, in Salem, Massachusetts. He graduated from Salem High School (Massachusetts), Salem High School with the Class of 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he served in the United States Army, Army as a journalist, after which he moved to New York City to work as an editor in the science fiction field. One of his stories had been published by Frederik Pohl in the September 1966 issue of ''If (magazine), If'' but h ...
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Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz (born May 7, 1969) is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction, who has written for the periodicals ''Popular Science'' and ''Wired''. From 1999 to 2008 Newitz wrote a syndicated weekly column called ''Techsploitation'', and from 2000 to 2004 was the culture editor of the ''San Francisco Bay Guardian''. In 2004 Newitz became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded ''Other'' magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015 Newitz was editor-in-chief of Gawker-owned media venture ''io9'', and subsequently its direct descendant ''Gizmodo'', Gawker's design and technology blog. As of 2019, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at ''The New York Times''. Early life Newitz was born in 1969, and grew up in Irvine, California, graduating from Irvine High School, and in 1987 moved to Berkeley, California.Annalee Newitz, 2006, "About Annalee," at techsploita ...
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