December 2017 Archives

It's the time of year when nominations open for the various genre fiction awards, and some folks announce what they've published that is eligible (while others bite their lips and refuse to tout for votes in what is essentially a beauty pageant).

I only published two works of fiction in 2017, both novels—"Empire Games" and "The Delirium Brief", books 7 and 8 in the Merchant Princes/Empire Games and Laundry Files series. As such, they're highly unlikely to make the best novel shortlist in the Hugo awards. However, since 2016 there's been a new category, "best series". Please do not nominate the Laundry Files for the best series Hugo award in 2018.

(Explanation below the cut.)

Dark State

So, Dark State comes out in hardcover in the USA and trade paperback in the UK on January 9th and January 11th respectively.

I'm going to be reading from the novel, and signing copies, at Blackwells Bookshop on South Bridge in Edinburgh on January 10th; if you're in town and what to show up, tickets and details are available here (it's free, but space is limited).

If you want a signed copy, Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh are happy to take orders, as are Blackwell's via email. Note that bookstores aren't allowed to ship pre-orders before the publication date, so there's precisely zero chance of getting a copy in time for Christmas!

(I have no plans to visit the USA in 2018. US Immigration is just too damn scary while there's a xenophobe in the White House. However, both bookstores I linked to are willing to ship books to North America and elsewhere.)

AI assisted porn video is, it seems, now a thing. For those of you who don't read the links: you can train off-the-shelf neural networks to recognize faces (or other bits of people and objects) in video clips. You can then use the trained network to edit them, replacing one person in a video with a synthetic version of someone else. In this case, Rule 34 applies: it's being used to take porn videos and replace the actors with film stars. The software runs on a high-end GPU and takes quite a while—hours to days—to do its stuff, but it's out there and it'll probably be available to rent as a cloud service running on obsolescent bitcoin-mining GPU racks in China by the end of next week.

(Obvious first-generation application: workplace/social media sexual harassers just got a whole new toolkit.)

But it's going to get a whole lot worse.

Specials

Merchandise

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This page is an archive of entries from December 2017 listed from newest to oldest.

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