Continuing with the reading, I decided move out of my retro cyberpunk phase and back into present. Trundling down to magnation I picked up the latest (January) issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s. I rarely read these magz. In fact I only seek them out when forewarned that they might contain interesting content. Bruce has been talking for ages about this ubicomp book he’s been working on, and finally said he’d sold it as a novella to FnSF. I’m not sure how I learned Stross also had a new story out that month. Anyway, they’re both good, and here’s my notes on ’em.

Kiosk – Bruce Sterling’s novella about ubicomp, the internet of things and fabbers. Clearly an ode to his adopted home of Belgrade, Serbia being set in some unnamed part of Eastern Europe. Traces how new technology is adapted by the people, how “the street finds it own use for things”. Reading this I couldn’t help comparing it The Host, the South Korean monster movie, who’s star’s are the family of an old man running a beach side kiosk.

Trunk and Disorderly– Charles Stross short story set in a future where Japanese corporations have bought and adopted royal titles. Where the extreme sport of the day is riding a “surf board” from a drop in orbit, plummeting to earth, surfing the winds and convection currents. Addresses something I’d been thinking about – in a future of practical immortality, when one can backup their mind and restore it to a new body on “death”, extreme sports can be as crazy as one can make them. Also features an alcoholic miniature mammoth.