Lecture: Will novels remain writers' favourite form?

China Mieville asks Will the novel remain writers' favourite narrative form?

Has the dominant literary form of the 19th and 20th centuries grown stale? Is it no longer the best means of delivering stories in the 21st century? Or does the classic literary novel remain the form best placed to deliver innovative, memorable writing? Drawing on discussions about censorship, style, politics and identity, this session, bringing Edinburgh's 2012 Conference to a close, offers an address by multi award-winning author, China Mieville with renowned author Janne Teller in the moderator's chair.

Lecture: What we learned from 5 million books

Have you played with Google Labs' NGram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

How Old Books Get That Distinctive Smell

Walk into a used bookshop and you will encounter the unique aroma of aging books. The smell is loved by some, disliked by others, but where does it come from?

Lecture: The Enigma Machine

At Fractal’11 last April, author Kij Johnson gave an interesting lecture entitled The Enigma Machine: Writing, Typewriters, and Decoding the Truth.

During World War two, the German military sent information critical to the war through messages encoded and decoded on Enigma machines, small rotor machines that looked a bit like typewriters. A message encoded by an Enigma machine was nearly impossible to decode except with another Enigma machine.

Here’s another way to think of it: the Enigma was a typewriter that concealed and revealed the truth. Every writer works as an Enigma machine, using her typewriter (or computer keyboard or pen) to do the same things. This talk explores the ways a writer uses fiction to code and decode reality, lie and tell the truth.

Lecture: Beautiful Books and the future of Storytelling

The always-excellent Craig Mod of Flipboard on “beautiful books” and the future of storytelling in age of digital books – a must-watch for any storyteller, designer, and media observer.

Lecture: China Miéville on Scholarly SF/F

In 2009, noted author China Mieville came to the University of Kansas for the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture series. He spoke for over an hour, covering topics as diverse as the effects of H.G. Wells' vision of the future on the genre and how science fiction sees itself today.

Via: AboutSF

Lecture: The Future as Mirror

"The Future as Mirror: How SF Uses the Tomorrow to Understand Today"

Science fiction is popularly understood to be about showing us the world of the future: space travel, robots, immortality, encounters with aliens, mechanized cities, human evolution. But in fact much science fiction, though it may be set a hundred or a thousand years from now, is more about the present than about times to come. Both consciously and unconsciously, the futures science fiction writers present arise from and comment on the way things are today, often with the goal of changing the present or even preventing the future.

This talk shows how this has been true from science fiction’s earliest days until now. It gives examples from books and films of ways in which sf had held up a fun-house mirror to the present, both serious and comic, restricting and liberating.