Story idea starter.
Originally shared by Will Shetterly
“The spread of misinformation online is becoming so pervasive that the World Economic Forum listed it as one of their global risks to society in 2013, alongside terrorism and cyberattacks.”
A good start for 2016: the first book I’ve finished this year earns five stars and the “well-edited” tag.
If you’re up for beautifully written YA with a wonderful character voice, an author who really understands chronic illness, skyships, bird people, a suspenseful plot and fantastical worldbuilding, here it all is.
Lots of science-fictional possibilities here, not all of them dark ones.
Originally shared by Stewart Brand
Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
[My Edge answer at the link]
The new biotech tool called “gene drive” changes our relation to wild species profoundly. Any gene (or set of genes) can be forced to “drive” through an entire wild population. It doesn’t matter if the trait the genes control is deleterious to the organism. With one genetic tweak to its germline, a species can even be compelled to go extinct.
The technique works by forcing homozygosity. Once the genes for a trait are homozygous (present on both chromosomes) and the parents are both homozygous, they will breed true for that trait in all their descendants. Artificially selecting for desired traits via homozygosity is what breeders do. Now there’s a shortcut.
In effect, gene-drive genes forbid the usual heterozygosity in cross-bred parents. In any two parents, if one of them is gene-drive homozygous, all their offspring will be gene-drive homozygous and will express the gene-drive trait. Proviso: it only works with sexually reproducing species—forget bacteria. And it only spreads quickly enough in rapidly reproducing species—forget humans.
The mechanism was first described in 2003 as a potential tool by Austin Burt of Imperial College London. The way it works is that a “homing endonuclease gene” cuts the DNA in the adjoining chromosome and provides the template for the DNA repair, thus duplicating itself. In Richard Dawkins terms, it is an exceptionally selfish gene. Heterozygous becomes homozygous, and after several generations the gene is present in every individual of the population. The phenomenon is common in nature.
Gene drive shifted from an interesting concept to a powerful tool with the arrival in the last few years of a breakthrough in genome editing called CRISPR-Cas9. Suddenly genes could be edited easily, cheaply, quickly, and with great precision. It was a revolution in biotech.
In 2014 George Church and Kevin Esvelt at Harvard published three papers spelling out the potential power of CRISPR-enabled gene drive and the kind of public and regulatory oversight needed to ensure its responsible deployment. They also encouraged the development of an “undo” capability. Ideally the effects of an initial gene drive release could, if desired, be reversed before it spread too far with the release of a countermanding secondary gene drive.
The benefits of gene drive could be huge. Vector-borne scourges like malaria and dengue fever could be eliminated by eliminating (or just adjusting) the mosquitoes that carry them. Food crops could be protected by reversing herbicide-resistance in weeds. Wildlife conservation would be able to cure one of its worst threats—the alien invasive rats, mice, ants, etc. that are massively destructive to native species on ocean islands. With gene drive the invaders could be completely extirpated (driven extinct locally), and the natives would be protected permanently.
Developments are coming quickly. A team at Harvard proved that gene drive works in yeast. A team at UC San Diego inadvertently proved that it works in fruit flies. Most importantly, Anthony James at UC Irvine and colleagues showed that malaria mosquitoes could be altered with gene drive so that they no longer carry the disease. Kevin Esvelt is developing a project to do the same with white-footed mice, which are the wildlife reservoir for Lyme disease in humans; if they are cured, humans will be as well.
The power to permanently change wild populations genetically is a serious matter. There are ecological questions, ethical issues, and many technical nuances that have to be sorted out thoroughly. Carefully, gradually, they will be.
Humanity has decided about this sort of thing before. Guinea worms are a horrible parasite that used to afflict 2.5 million people, mostly in Africa. In 1980 disease control experts set about eliminating the worms totally from the world, primarily through improved water sanitation. That goal of deliberate extinction is now on the brink of completion. One of the strongest advocates of the project, President Jimmy Carter, declared publicly, “I would like the last Guinea worm to die before I do.”
Gene drive is not a new kind of power, but it is a new level of power. And a new level of responsibility.
“Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens.”
– Orson Scott Card, Characters and Viewpoint
This reminds me of the scene in Terry Pratchett’s The Truth where he talks about how people don’t want news, they want “olds”. We build out from the familiar, and give it freshness through a new perspective.
Having a nostalgic blogwander, and found this post, which I wrote nearly 10 years ago and still, in large part, agree with. It’s a rambling reflection that starts with John Barthes, continues through Gene Wolfe, and concludes that the problem with both modernism and postmodernism is not that they are empty, but that they’ve been emptied, in a baby-with-the-bathwater sense.
Well, 2016 has arrived where I am, so it’s time for my now-annual post summarising the books I read last year.
I read more 5-star books and fewer 3-star books than in 2014, with about the same number of 4-star books, so the trend is good.
Both Lisa Cohen and S. A. Hunt make the top 15, Lisa repeating her 2014 achievement with another in the same series.
So, my end-of-year short story stats (assuming no surprises in the next 12 hours):
2014: 44 submitted, 1 acceptance, 20 form rejections, 14 personalised rejections, earnings $0.00. (The accepted story was paid for in the following year.)
2015: 52 submitted, 8 acceptances, 28 form rejections, 13 personalised rejections, earnings $354.09.
I have five pending submissions, of which one is a rewrite request that I hope will become another sale.
I started seriously submitting at the beginning of 2014, so that gives you some indication of where hard work and determination can take you in a couple of years. Not far, in some ways, but a long way in others.
Open call: Science fiction dealing with medicine, health, and illness in up to 3000 words. Up to 20 pieces will be published in the competition anthology. Payment of at least 50 pounds for published pieces.
Lisa Cohen, sounds like something you might be into?
Here’s the interview I did yesterday with the Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast, complete with show notes, links, and both video and audio formats.
http://www.marketingsff.com/editing-and-selling-short-fiction/
Well, hey, look at that – because we did a Hangout On Air, this interview is already available. It’ll also come through as an audio-only podcast soon (I have a good face for radio, so if you want to spare yourself…).
Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself an “editing expert”. But I do know some things.
Originally shared by Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast
Today we’ll talk to indie author and editing expert Mike Reeves McMillan about how to avoid common grammatical and formatting mistakes, and produce the sort of manuscript the traditional publishers are looking for.