A decade ago, cutting-edge writers/publishers were crafting books that were physically works of art, in response to the rise of ebooks. Now, those same people are making apps. Miranda July, creator of the instant-messaging app Somebody, talks to Russell Quinn, co-creator (with Eli Horowitz) of The Pickle Index and The Silent History, about making apps that are deliberately difficult to use.

Miranda July, of course, is the author of The First Bad Man and the director of Me and You and Everyone We Know, and her app delivers your message not to your intended recipient, but to the subscriber standing closest to that person, who then delivers it verbally. The Silent History is an app that traces the stories of children who were raised without language, over four decades. The Pickle Index, which is a novel as well as an app, follows a dystopian government that requires its citizens to use a recipe-sharing app.

http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Bad-...

Miranda July: It’s a good thing we’re having this conversation, because you’re still a little mysterious to me, even though we’ve been working together for a year. Our friend-iversary is tomorrow, actually — we first met in person on Thanksgiving last year.

I’m going to start by saying what I tell people about you and you can tell me how incorrect that is. So, if I’m pitching you to somebody as a collaborator, I say: He’s from the UK and he started this successful technology company in London called Butter and he ended up finding that life to be exhausting, so he left it all and he moved to a redwood forest in California. He lives in a place called Cazadero and it’s a real thicket — he opens his front door and it bumps into a tree — and now he only works on the finest and most-groundbreaking digital projects and he does that because he’s just so talented. And the other person says “Great!”

So, did I get anything wrong?

Russell Quinn: I am British, that part is true. But, the company I started was actually in Copenhagen — I moved there to start it with a Danish friend — and the name of the company was Spoiled Milk.

Miranda: Oh! I’m realizing that “Butter” was actually the name of a band my husband was in.

Russell: Well, they’re both dairy products! But, right, I was in Copenhagen, which was actually my first attempt to find something more meaningful to me. Before that, in the early-to-mid two-thousands, I was working for Sony in Bristol, UK making the tools that games companies use to make games — optimizing compilers, making performance-tuning software. Low-level computer science things that people wouldn’t ever directly experience in their lives. But in my spare time, I was making stop-motion animations and helping out at a local art-book store where I discovered, among other things, McSweeney’s.

Miranda: Right, McSweeney’s! That’s a piece of the story I forgot.

Russell: It was at that bookstore where I met Casper Hübertz, a Dane who was studying graphic design in the UK for a year. When it was time for him to return home, we somehow decided to start a design company together. So I quit my job, moved to Denmark and for a year we avoided digital completely — we made record covers and music videos for bands, which felt good, but we weren’t making enough money to live in Copenhagen, so we started building websites and then things took off. I ended up moving to Switzerland to open a second office, and Spoiled Milk became a digital agency working for the Swiss Post Office and Danish political parties. Things were good, but had somehow skirted what I was originally looking for. Or maybe I just didn’t know what I was looking for. In 2009, I ended up burning out, leaving, and looking for new projects again. That was the year that the iPhone really started to take hold and I ended up contacting McSweeney’s to see if they wanted to collaborate on an app. Eli Horowitz, who was then publisher, replied and we got to work. Him in San Francisco, me in Zurich. I subsequently ended up moving to California and collaborating with Eli on these digital fiction oddities that we now make together.

Miranda: The two of you just happened to be interested in the same thing?

Russell: We both had similar frustrations, but from kind of opposite directions. Eli was feeling sad about how beautiful printed books were ending up as lackluster e-books and I was feeling sad about gimmicky, technology-driven storytelling experiments that had out-of-copyright classics shoehorned into them. We felt like there was some missing middle ground. We didn’t have answers, but we wanted to experiment. The first result of that was The Silent History, which came out in 2012.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Silent-His...

Miranda: Tell me about that again.

Russell: That was a story about a generation of children born without a sense of language—it followed them from birth over the next four decades. The text was serialized over six months via an app and also included site-specific Field Reports — immersive short stories built around the physical environment of the events described, like a walking tour blurring the real world and the fictional world.

Miranda: That aspect always reminded me of Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, where you put on headphones and you “turn ninety degrees this way” and” look forward and you’ll see a house on a hill.” That long predated the current technology, but it always seemed so amazing to me that you could use the real world more with technology — in that case, it was just a Walkman. As an author, I’m often approached to do uncomfortable-seeming hybrid projects and I always think “Well, if I’m going to do that, I just want to write a book.” The real enticement comes from getting something of real life that you can’t get from just writing a book — another dimension of reality.

Russell: You made your first app recently — Somebody, a really fun spin on a messaging service. What interests you about apps as an art form?

Miranda: I didn’t start out being specifically interested in apps, but somebody mentioned to me that they could make me an app for free and so that was enough to kick off me thinking “Well, what is an app?” Initially I wasn’t that focussed on it, but I am used to working in new mediums, or constantly switching between mediums, so the practice of thinking what can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else is very familiar.

And I love to meet people in their “homes,” to reach people with the devices they’re already using. Getting people to museums or a performance can be a really special encounter, but I also like the mundaneness of an exquisite experience that comes via something that is otherwise kind of deadening. The fine line of that is so interesting to me. Especially right at this moment in the development of technology — there’s so much stuff you don’t want or need, but there’s the occasional thing that’s, like, maybe there’s hope for all of us!

Russell: Yeah. We’ve been trained to expect apps — unless they’re obviously a game, which brings with it another bunch of preconceptions — to be immediately understandable, to have perfect usability, to be something that works for us. But that’s not normally true of storytelling. You start reading a novel or watching a movie and you have no idea what’s going on, but you trust the storyteller that these things will be revealed and you work to meet them halfway. That’s most of the fun!

Miranda: That’s what made The Pickle Index, your new project, give me such a weird sensation. I could feel palpably that everything was intentional and working perfectly, but it wasn’t yet understandable. So my brain had to respond to it as I would with storytelling.

I’m always reminding myself that filmmaking is the art of omission — that’s what creates story and suspense. And this is the same thing, but with an app. Getting to feel your needs for a moment is more interesting than having every need catered for, to feel a little lost or thrown or confused. That’s what makes some people — including me — uneasy about technology. Is it taking away our ability to sit with discomfort or not knowing? So I like that you consciously built that into this.

Russell: We were trying to explore that both in the app’s functionality and in the story itself. The book is about a goofy prison break in a faraway land where a semi-oppressive government tries to raise morale among its citizens by creating a mandatory recipe-sharing network to promote the nation’s traditional cuisine — fermented vegetables, elderly dairy, and oddly colored meats.

The hardcover version is two books in a slipcase, which plays with the physical format in fun, tactile ways. It’s a new kind of reading experience, but you’re still a human in the real world reading a storybook — the way we’re all used to reading a novel, outside-in.

The app, however, is the mandatory recipe-sharing network itself — the inside-out version. You launch the app and you’re suddenly within the story, using the Index alongside other citizens. The adventure takes place over ten days and in the app you experience this over ten days in real time. The more you explore and poke around, the more you learn about what it is you’re using. Along the way, there are mini-games, dynamic maps, network overloads.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Pickle-Ind...

So, on day one, you open the app and you might feel confused. But this is a propaganda device designed by a loopy government to promote the consumption of fermented foodstuffs — it is weird. The overall result is hopefully an immersive, exploratory experience.

Miranda: I was exploring similar questions in Somebody, which was purposefully inefficient — one person personally delivered a message on behalf of a separate person. You had to do all this extra work. It’s much easier to just text a message. I don’t think it’s just a conceit, but if it is then all of the history of literature and film and dance and music is a conceit. If it feels different, it’s because we watched this technology being invented and we feel like we should be behind the curtain and there should be no mystery.

Russell: Yeah, I see the similarities between the projects. With Somebody, the snap reaction is: why would I go through this process of delivering a message via a real person when I could just send an email? With Pickle, it’s why would I want to poke around in a recipe-sharing app, when I could just read the text? But, hopefully, once you dig deeper, you find that both projects are offering unique encounters with experiences that you think you know how they should work.

Miranda: Are there a lot of people like you? Do you have a sense of peers? I don’t know the landscape of this world.

Russell: There are definitely some other people working on experimental projects like this. But, I do think there’s probably a lack of qualified developers and designers willing to experiment to this degree. A result of the current Silicon Valley tech boom is that there are many great developers but they’ve all been sucked up by venture-backed start-ups or Facebook. They’re working on projects with very different aims — products and systems that strive to problem-solve and disrupt and scale to millions or billions or users. There’s so much about that world which does not allow for a freer expression of ideas. Ideas that can exist without a super-rational reason. I think some people — including myself at various stages — are confused why we spent three years creating Pickle, when we could have created a usable recipe-sharing network that we then sold to Uber. Instead Eli and I spent the time sculpting a weird, fictional, storytelling experience, mainly because it was enjoyable to create something together. That feels instinctively odd to people when viewed against the current gold-rush backdrop of the app scene, but is something that happens in other mediums all the time.

I think the Valley’s current lack of availability for experimentation also makes it hard for authors, filmmakers, comedians, whoever — who maybe want to dip their toe into bespoke technology experiences — to find capable collaborators.

Miranda: I appreciate that you sort of… well, I remember a meeting we were once both in with an investor guy and he knew I was an artist and was kind of talking to both of us like we didn’t know anything about tech and was sort of talking down to me, which was maybe appropriate because I didn’t know anything, but I found myself compelled to blurt out “Russell knows!” And you said, very gently, “Yeah, I know what [whatever the word was] is.” I appreciate that you don’t perpetuate the masculinity of the industry — it’s a very sexist industry — and you don’t use your knowledge in that hyper-masculine way. It’s a subtle thing, I think it must come from a pretty deep place that’s just you, because a lot of people would not choose to be like that. It’s really hard to come up with another way to be within that culture.

Russell: That macho mindset you’re getting at is definitely something that turns me off about the Valley right now. But it also seems hard for individuals to break out of it. Tech is the boom industry of the decade. Although this is changing, it’s historically populated by nerdy boys who grew up alone-ish with computers, and now their hobby has become this big industry and people are treating them like superstars, throwing money at them to work on tough problems that can affect millions of people around the world. It seems hard to not get an ego and feel like it’s deserved and to comprehend relative privilege over but I felt isolated growing up. I’m not saying the industry shouldn’t be evaluating its culture — it definitely should — but just that I can step back and sorta see how it got this way. There’s so much backlash right now, but I think trying to understand things it is the first part of correcting them.

I’ve often seen people join companies and quickly get caught up in the groupspeak and superiority complexes and belief that the only thing worth doing is erasing every inefficiency in daily life because everything should be as optimized as possible. Why the hell should I get a stranger to go and deliver a message to a friend when I can just send a text message to anyone in the world in a second? But there’s clearly room for both. It’s obviously amazing that we can send messages anywhere on the globe in an instant, but there are also ways that technology could make life more fun or fulfilling, not just more streamlined and efficient. Sadly, I think there’s not much room for that kind of stuff right now, because investment-led technology is using up all the resources and organizing people into gender-segregated funnels of agreement before they realize there even are alternatives. No individual is to blame here, but if it was easier for people to step out of that world, I think more people would want to. But a gold rush is not a good climate for that.

Miranda: For me there was a very steep learning curve while building Somebody and then rebuilding Somebody and that’s when I first reached out to you. Actually, I was pretty much on the floor crying from the learning curve. And that’s when things were going relatively well! Part of the problem was not understanding that this was a medium that never ended, where you didn’t ever finish work. I had approached it as if it would be done on the day I launched it, so I had to learn all these new ways of thinking, this new iterative process.

While I was working on Somebody, I also had to get a show ready, a performance. But I decided that instead of working really, really hard on it alone and then having a dress rehearsal near the end, I would start getting feedback from the beginning. So just as I was doing weekly sprints making the app, I did that with the performance. So, week one, I didn’t have it memorized, I was just holding my script, and I had an audience of fourteen people in my studio who had never seen it before. That forced me to learn quickly and work toward the next week. It’s useful to me, for all of my work, to learn a new process of creation.

Russell: I’ve always enjoyed working in technology but placing myself in different industries — working with writers, illustrators, people in TV, and so forth. It feels so much less isolating than working in a tech company making the things tech companies usually make. I need that connection to people who make things in completely different ways.

Miranda: Is that why you like to live in the woods? I’m remembering that in the thick of my hell with Somebody, you were just starting to help me and were also working really long hours on other projects, and you’d be taking a walk and text me a photo of, like, a beautiful sunrise. And I’d think What? I didn’t know we were allowed to take walks and see beautiful sunrises. It made me think that you’d been through this crunch again and again and you must have learned what you need to be ok, to just be a person.

Russell: I guess, but I’m sure that’s the same as any industry: you go through enough projects and you figure out which problems are real and which are transitory. That was your first big tech project, so you were feeling every bump. But if things were switched and we’d been making a movie — I have never made a movie — it would have been me freaking out and you texting me sunrises.

Miranda: I would never text sunrises while making a movie.

Top image via Sudden Oak, Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz’s company.

Jason Voorhees may have met his match. It’s the number 13. It’s been six years since the twelfth Friday the 13th film came out—and the forthcoming 13th sequel just got hit with another string of setbacks.

The Wrap reports director David Bruckner, who’d been on the project for over a year, has left. The reason? Variety reports writer Aaron Guzikowski (who wrote Prisoners) has just come on board to pen a new script and the producers, who include Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes colleagues, didn’t feel it was fair for Bruckner to wait around while they waited on a new script.

It’s just the latest delay on this the 13th Friday the 13th film (that’s counting Freddy vs. Jason as #11), a movie that was originally expected to be released in 2013, for obvious reasons. It was then given a 2015 release date after Paramount traded the rights with Warner Bros., and then got bumped back again to 2016 and, most recently, to 2017. Friday January 13, 2017 to be exact. Bruckner came on in 2014 and several other writers have been attached along the way.

Since there’s a new script being written, we don’t know what the movie will be about. Jason will, obviously, be featured prominently but old rumors of it being a found footage movie are not true. One possibility though is a story that explores Jason’s immortality. Here’s producer Brad Fuller from an Esquire interview last year.

There’s always been this supernatural aspect to these movies. It defies logic that, you see Jason get killed in every movie, including ours, the 2009 one. And then he comes back and no one’s ever really investigated what that is. So that’s something that I think about a little bit. Like it is supernatural, but what is he? Those are the things that we’re toying with. Nothing has been decided. But those type of things: How does he always come back?

People traditionally want to understand exactly how and why things happen, and yet something so odd happens at the end of these movies and no one seems to question it. So people come to the movie with the expectation that the real villain will be killed and come back. And yet we never toyed with that notion….Those are the things that we’re asking ourselves. And we’ll see what comes of it.

However, that was an idea Fuller had been working on with Bruckner. Whether or not that’ll be what Guzikowski does, we’ll find out in 2017. Maybe. After all, this is lucky number thirteen.

Bonus: Bruckner has confirmed and is talking about the news a bit on Twitter.

[Variety, The Wrap, Esquire]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Okay, so, if you’re worried about spoilers, this first teaser for the next season of Game of Thrones doesn’t actually have any new footage in it—but it’s got one hell of an awesomely portentous bit of dialogue over it that has some spoilery connotations. So consider this your warning!

There’s actually two narrators—Max Von Sydow, who’ll be playing the Three Eyed Raven in the upcoming season, kicks it off, telling us that the past is already written (and presumably unchangeable), all cut over shots of people doing what they do best in Game of Thrones—dying and being horrifically maimed. There’s a lot of Starks included, but there’s a very obvious focus on one in particular, Jon Snow, and his seemingly final end at the climax of season 5

But another voice retorts to the Raven that “They have no idea what’s going to happen”... and it’s none other than Bran Stark himself! I dunno about you guys, but that sounds like a pointed reference to what is Game of Thrones worst kept secret.

http://io9.com/hbo-teases-gam...

Oh, and by the way Bran? We like to think we know at least a little about what’s going to happen. Game of Thrones returns next April.

Last month, I was completely blindsided by the creepy, compelling opening to The Vision. Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta crafted an incredible first issue that explored the Avenging Android’s new family, and how coldly inhuman they were—but the second issue gives them some dark, fascinatingly human problems.

Spoilers ahead for The Vision #2, by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, and Jordie Bellaire.

http://io9.com/the-vision-is-...

The Vision #2 picks up in the wake of Virginia’s decision to lie about the death of Grim Reaper at her hands to Vision. It’s once again a master sequence from King, who combines the grisly humanity of Virginia’s action—she killed to protect her children, and she’s lying to protect them now—with the cold, unemotional way she recounts her lie to her husband.

It’s just one of the many ways that the issue brings these two parallels together, the haunting robotic nature of the synthezoid family mixed with the human turmoil they find themselves thrust into makes for a comic that is absolutely laden with stand out moments.

All three of Vision’s family members get that moment in the issue, that sharp stab of humanity in and amongst the otherly nature of their android selves. For Viv, it comes in the opening splash page, her half-missing body strewn across a hospital bed as she repeatedly calls for her mother—the literal inhumanity of her robotic form, all tubes and wires, contrasted with the emotional humanity of a dying girl crying out for her mother. For Virginia, it’s in her carefully constructed lie, immediately followed by her and The Vision hugging in the eerie silence of their house.

For their son, Vin, it’s at school, where without Viv he stands out all the more as something non-human. There’s some great, silent imagery throughout of Vin being alone at school—sat at an empty table in an otherwise full canteen, phasing through the floor to return home in an corridor surrounded by people staring at him. It climaxes when one of Viv’s classmates asks him where she is, and when all Vin can respond with is a monotone “My Sister is out. She is ill,” the kid makes the mistake of insulting the Visions. Vin snaps—accompanied by a fantastic bit of dialogue from the book’s ever-present mysterious narrator, a chilling mediation on the similarities between humans and synthezoids:

But strangely enough, it’s actually The Vision himself who gets the most heartbreakingly human moment of the story. When Vision and Virginia are called in about Vin’s outburst in the canteen, the Principal equates the Visions with guns—metal shaped into a form that can kill—arguing that Vin and Viv have no place among other children.

Vision rattles off about how he’s an Avenger, and the Principal is only still alive because The Vision has saved the world 37 times, so he can prove that he’s in control of his family and their interaction with the wider world. For Vision, it’s meant to be a moment of triumph, that he’s proved both himself and his family. But to the reader, who know about the dark moments his family are hiding from him, it’s surprisingly tragic: A moment of unwitting, human fallibility from someone who thinks of himself in that moment as completely infallible. How little he knows that it’s all falling apart for him, right under his nose, is like a knife through your heart.

And it’s only going to get worse. The omnipresent narrator states that the Principal might have saved the world if only he’d been harder on The Visions, a delectable portent of things to come—but the more immediate threat is revealed in the issue’s final pages.

Someone is blackmailing Virginia, someone who saw her bury the corpse of the Grim Reaper. It’s a dramatic and well done twist, but when you think about it, horrifying (and after all, The Vision is an increasingly nerve-racking horror comic as much as it is one about superpowered androids). We’ve already seen Virginia snap once, the razor-thin facade between quiet wife and unstoppable killer peeling away. If someone is trying to push her buttons, so to speak, to make her fearful, what she could possibly do next is petrifying to think about. The power of something deliberately not-human, given to someone being pushed into very human emotions.

Consider this your monthly reminder to read The Vision. It is, without a doubt, one of the boldest and most captivating series coming out of Marvel at the moment—and quite like anything I’ve seen in a mainstream superhero comic for a long while.

It was Christmas Eve, 1985. Seattle attorney Charles Goldmark was at home with his wife, Annie, and their two children, 10-year-old Colin and 12-year-old Derek; all were eagerly anticipating the festive holiday dinner to come. But a murderous, hate-filled stranger would put an end to all of their plans.

David Lewis Rice knocked on the door of the Goldmark home, pretending to deliver a package. He pushed his way in, brandishing a $3 toy gun. He then knocked out the family with chloroform before, as the Spokane Chronicle reported, he “handcuffed the parents and used a knife and steam iron to attack them [all].” His confession was horribly graphic, wrote the AP:

At one point in the tape, Rice described how his victims were still alive after he chloroformed them, then bashed their skulls open with the tip of the steam iron.

“So I decided to complete the job with a knife,” he said. “I inserted the point of the knife in the skull where it was broken from the iron ... and stirred it around.”

Annie and Colin died that day of their injuries; Charles survived in a hospital until January 9, 1986, while a comatose Derek held on until the end of January.

Twenty-seven-year-old David Rice was arrested on December 26 after using a bank card he’d stolen from the home—his only haul, aside from $14 in cash. Robbery had been one reason he’d entered the home. But he apparently had another motive, which was something much more disturbing, and is the reason this case has become so infamous.

According to the New York Times, Rice “saw himself as an anti-Communist soldier and them as Communists,” denying initial reports that he’d targeted the Goldmarks for being Jewish. He also claimed he didn’t realize children would be at the home, but once he’d invaded, he decided, “I’m in it now. I have to go through with it.”

As it happened, the Goldmarks were neither Jewish nor Communists.

Charles Goldmark had been legal counsel to the Washington state Democratic Party, and had worked on Gary Hart’s Presidential campaign. But the Communist thing had some historical context, though Rice interpreted it one hundred percent incorrectly. He’d heard of Charles Goldmark’s family at a meeting of the “Duck Club,” which the New York Times described as a “conservative political organization;” soon after the Goldmark murders, the founder of the Duck Club denied to the Times that the group ever preached any kind of violence or anti-Semitism. (He did say, however, they were a staunchly anti-Communist group.)

So why was the Duck Club talking about the Goldmarks, and why did Rice fixate on them? The New York Times explained the history:

In 1963 John Goldmark, father of Charles Goldmark, sued for libel after his career as a member of the Washington Legislature was cut short by charges that he was a Communist. He won a $40,000 judgment. Sally Goldmark, his wife and Charles’s mother, was a Communist Party member for several years in the 1930’s, it was disclosed at that time.

By 1985, the time of the Charles Goldmark family murders, the elder Goldmarks had already passed away.

Rice’s trial was held in the summer of 1986; though his legal sanity was called into question, he was convicted of four counts of aggravated first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In 1998, after a new penalty trial was granted, his sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole, after he pled guilty to the charges instead.

David Rice sits with his attorneys Anthony Savage and Bill Lanning as his trial got underway in Seattle, May 13, 1986. (AP Photo)

http://truecrime.io9.com/bloodiest-chri...

Some of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2015 still haven’t come out yet. There’s a whole month of galaxy-shattering tales ahead of us. Including Star Wars! Dean Koontz! And thrilling tales from A.M. Dellamonica, Adam Roberts and Brian Staveley! Here are this month’s most essential science fiction and fantasy reads!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster (Random House)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Force-Awak...

Let’s just get this one out of the way first of all. Alan Dean Foster novelized the very first Star Wars movie, and also wrote the first Star Wars tie-in novel. So it’s super cool that he’s novelizing the first Star Wars film in a decade. Want to know what actually happens in this book? So do we.

Amazon | BN | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

A Daughter of No Nation by A.M. Dellamonica (Tor)

http://www.amazon.com/Daughter-No-Na...

Sophie travels back to the magical realm she came from, leaving her adoptive parents behind. Sophie aims to get her mother out on bail until a tricky court case is resolved—but soon she and her siblings get caught up in a crazy conspiracy. And Sophie is determined to use science to solve the problems of this magical world she’s caught up in. Kirkus calls this “a fantasy adventure set in a seafaring world full of tall ships and political intrigue,” and says “Sophie is an engaging heroine, and Stormwrack is a rich world that’s well worth exploring.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

The Rising (The Alchemy Wars) by Ian Tregillis (Orbit)

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

Here’s the second book in Tregillis’ alternate history series where the Dutch have conquered the world using alchemy and clockwork soldiers. We were totally blown away by the first book, which was as much about the nature of free will as the geopolitics of a world ruled by crazy alchemist clockmakers. Kirkus gives the second volume a coveted starred review, and says, “Middle volumes are always tricky; they can often read as an obstacle to overcome on the way to the forgone conclusion of the third installment. Tregillis commendably avoids this trap, deepening his story and keeping it moving along toward an unknown horizon.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Warrior Women by Paula Guran (Editor) (Prime Books)

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

We’ve seen a few anthologies of stories about badass women—but this one includes stories by Elizabeth Bear, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ken Liu, Seanan McGuire, George R.R. Martin, Robert Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Jane Yolen, Carrie Vaughn, Elizabeth Moon, Tanith Lee and Nancy Kress—among others. It’s a pretty unbeatable lineup.

Amazon | BN | Mysterious Galaxy

The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

Adam Roberts has won praise and awards for his clever, strange fiction. And this latest novel is a tribute to John Carpenter’s The Thing, about two men at an Antarctic research station—that attempts to answer the Fermi Paradox. With Immanuel Kant! That is basically the best combination ever.

Amazon | BN

The Curse of Jacob Tracy by Holly Messinger (St. Martin’s Press)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Curse-Jaco...

This debut novel is getting rave reviews all over the place. Jacob Tracy nearly died in the Civil War, and ever since then he has the ability to see ghosts—and other supernatural creatures—that nobody else can see. He tries not to use his abilities, but then he gets drawn into helping his friend Sabine. Geeks of Doom raves, “Holly Messinger’s freshman novel is exciting from the start. It is historical fiction with a supernaturally scary twist.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor)

http://www.amazon.com/Barsk-Elephant...

In a future world of uplifted super-smart elephants, the Fant are forced to defend their world against an alliance of hundreds of other planets and races, which want to gain access to the drug that the Fant use to speak to the dead. Publishers Weekly writes, “Schoen’s vivid writing makes the Fant and the other species intensely relatable, elevating familiar themes of predetermination, prophecy, and the power of memory.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

The Untold Tale by JM Frey (REUTS)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Untold-Tal...

This subversive fantasy story is getting lots of early buzz for its clever take on the genre’s tropes. Forsyth is the weak, stuttering younger brother to the legendary hero Kintyre, and he’s out of his depth dealing with massive, world-shattering dangers—until he meets a woman named Pip, who’s journeyed to his magical realm from a world where Kintyre is a well-known fictional character. So it’s like Redshirts for fantasy, sort of. Beauty in Ruins calls it “an altogether lovely deconstruction of epic fantasy, portal fantasy, and traditional romantic fantasy - and one that is delightfully entirely self-aware.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy

Ashley Bell: A Novel by Dean Koontz (Bantam)

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

Bibi is dying of a rare and incurable brain cancer—until a seizure miraculously cures her. But there’s a price to her cure: She has to save the life of someone named Ashley Bell. And then she starts getting on the radar of some seriously scary people, while she’s also communicating telepathically with her boyfriend, a SEAL team leader on the other side of the world. Kirkus says, “Albeit slightly drawn out as it rolls to its conclusion, Koontz’s novel cuts between the fantastical and the believable to dissect evil, explore the power of imagination, and probe the parameters of consciousness.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Meeting Infinity by Jonathan Strahan (Editor) (Solaris)

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

Jonathan Strahan consistently edits the most fascinating unthemed anthologies out there, and this one features stories by Madeline Ashby, Gregory Benford, James S.A. Corey, Aliette de Bodard, Kameron Hurley, Nancy Kress, Bruce Sterling, Gwyneth Jones, Yoon Ha Lee, Ramez Naam, An Owomoyela, and many others. The loose theme in this fourth volume in the “Infinity” series is technological and biological changes that could help humans adapt to the future.

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Thunderbird by Jack McDevitt (Ace)

http://www.amazon.com/Thunderbird-Ja...

It’s a Stargate novel! Okay, not actually Stargate Stargate—but it’s about humanity discovering a mysterious gateway that leads to an unspoiled garden world. And soon, everybody on Earth is competing for control over this portal, while also trying to figure out what this miracle means for the future of humanity. Read an excerpt here.

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock (47North)

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

Antonia, daughter of the Renaissance master painter Paolo Uccello, wants to follow in her father’s footsteps—but options are limited for women painters in the fifteenth century. In the present day, a daughter mourning her mother’s death tries to help her copyist father decide which classical painting to make a copy of next. And in the 22nd century, a young woman discovers a never-before-found painting by Antonia Uccello that changes everything. Speculiction calls this book “one of 2015’s tip-top releases in science fiction.”

Amazon | BN | Indiebound | Mysterious Galaxy | Worldcat

Sources: SFSignal, Locus, Nerd Much, Amazon, publishers’ catalogs

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

http://www.amazon.com/All-Birds-Char...

Maddy Myers has an excellent take on the resulting—if small—fandom for Kilgrave following Jessica Jones. “Although I may not fully understand the fandom surrounding Kilgrave, I do understand the general desire to reclaim a bad experience or experiment within a fictional or virtual space.” Read the whole thing here.

Hollywood is hardly original. Movies pay homage and crib ideas from films that came before it and everyone pretends not to notice. But there are certain movies that are basically carbon copies of other movies that came out around the same time, just with different actors and different directors at the helm. It’s the result of competing studios trying to tackle the same plot. And it’s so funny when it happens!

ScreenRant found 10 “twin” movies that basically have the same story with another movie and it’s a phenomenon that’s more common than you’d think. Films like Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, The Prestige and The Illusionist, and so many more are such identical movies that we don’t know who stole what from who. There usually is a better movie, though!

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Last week on Into the Badlands, M.K. put his foot down with Sunny: He wants Sunny to teach him to fight. (Fight better, that is. The kid’s already pretty lethal.) Sunny agrees, but based on this minute-long exclusive preview of Sunday’s episode, he might regret taking on a new deadly pupil...

The next episode of Badlands airs 10 p.m. EST on Sunday on AMC, and I’ll be recapping it right here on io9.

Video courtesy AMC

Email the author at bryan@gizmodo.com, or follow him on Twitter.

After a long wait, NASA’s Orbital ATK Cygnus is headed up to the space station today, carting 7,000 pounds of gear along with it. Count down with us and watch the whole thing happen right here. UPDATE 6:25 p.m. EST: The launch has been rescheduled due to weather. The new date is tomorrow, Friday December 4th, at 5:33 p.m. (EST). We’ll be watching then!

It’s set to blast off at exactly 5:55 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time)—subject to changes, which we will be updating you on as they unfold. NASA TV is broadcasting the whole thing, and you can watch along here, as soon as they start broadcasting at 4:30:

What makes this launch unusual? Part of it is the 30 minute launch window they’ve allowed for.

Normally rockets have a to-the-second instantaneous launch window to intercept the International Space Station. Rockets by competitor SpaceX, or national rockets by the Russian, European, and Japanese space agencies all have this restriction. A handful of now-retired rockets have performance to spare to be a bit sloppy, giving them a longer window: both the space shuttle and the Orbital ATK Antares had up to a 10 minute window. But this new United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V configuration is blowing those short timespans away with a luxurious 30-minute launch window.

This extended window isn’t just about time; it’s an indication the rocket is over-powered for the purpose, but that’s part of ULA’s philosophy of maximizing the probability of a first-day launch. Along with more pure juice, the rocket also has better steering algorithms to allow it to catch up in orbit. This means that the launch team has the opportunity to wait for weather to clear up, boats to get out of the clearance zone, a technical problem to resolve, or otherwise pause for more favorable conditions instead of canceling the launch outright.

All of this means that for today, the Cygnus can launch between 5:55pm and 6:25pm EST instead of only blasting off at the very middle of the window at 6:10pm. If it doesn’t go off today, it has additional clear windows on December 4th, 5th, and 6th. Any later than that and the flight team will need to get more creative with their orbital dynamics. Alternately, Cygnus could launch late and loiter in orbit for a few weeks until rendezvousing with the station. The station will be in its annual solar-angle blackout period from December 24th through January 3rd.

Here’s hoping for a safe launch!

Update 6:18pm ET:

The launch attempt was scrubbed before the window was officially closed due to deteriorating weather conditions. This is unusual, but not entirely expected when the probability of Go-for-Launch conditions dropped from 40% to 30% down to 10% throughout the day.

The next launch window opens at 5:33pm ET tomorrow, again lasting for 30 minutes. The weather forecast remains grim, with only a 30% chance of acceptable conditions. If it also gets scrubbed, the mission has additional windows on December 5th and 6th before mission planners need to get creative.

Top image: Cygnus on the launch pad / NASA TV Bottom image: Orbital Cygnus pre launch / NASA.

As the leaders of 196 countries negotiate a carbon emissions goal for the planet to prevent an environmental apocalypse, the real work will fall to the companies that will need to deliver change to consumers. And no single person is doing as much to help change our energy consumption as one Elon Musk.

In a talk Musk gave in Paris yesterday, he explained how he believed the world might accelerate its transition out of the fossil fuel era, namely with the help of a carbon tax to swat irresponsible businesses—his competitors, ahem—out of the market or get them to change their ways. He also has a pretty great explainer on how extra carbon is bad for the planet’s natural equilibrium (he actually calls it the “turd in the punchbowl”).

Matthew deBord offers analysis at Business Insider which proposes that a fossil-free future was actually Musk’s plan all along, and the reason he organized his trifecta of companies (plus SolarCity which is owned by his family). If you think about it, this makes sense: Tesla’s electric cars served as a kind of a clean power Trojan horse that got people thinking about where their energy was coming from, priming this audience for Powerwall batteries and SolarCity panels which will change the way home energy is collected and stored. And the SpaceX stuff, well, that’s just a backup in case we do end up royally screwing the planet.

It doesn’t appear as though Musk is part of the Gates-Zuck-Bezos Climate Avengers Dream Team who are pledging to pump billions into clean energy tech, but let’s face it, Musk operates as his own mini-empire. If he can deliver on his promise to ship $800 million worth of batteries, that is a pretty significant chunk of energy that’s being shifted off the grid (hopefully for good). Those guys (they’re almost all guys) might be investing in important research but Musk already has solutions at market. I’m with Musk, all the way.

[Watch Musk’s talk: Part 1 and Part 2]

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

Space cowboy Richard Branson and his company, Virgin Galactic, showed off a 747-400 airplane that could launch rocket payloads from the air straight into orbit.

The mothership, a.k.a “Cosmic Girl,” would carry Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne rockets to new heights. In concept, using a modified commercial airplane as a rocket-carrier negates the need for a ground launch pad and all of its attendant logistics. Instead, the rocket is bound to the plane’s wing, and after reaching an altitude of 35,000 feet on its hitched ride, it can disengage, fire up its engine, and continue its mission to deposit a satellite payload into orbit.

Cosmic Girl, which has been in the Virgin fleet as a commercial aircraft since 2001, is set to undergo quite the transformation, per Virgin’s press release: “the LauncherOne rocket will be mounted to the carrier aircraft under the left wing, adjacent to the position that has been used by other 747s to ferry a fifth engine.” The rocket weighs about 55,000 pounds.

Originally conceived by Branson as a offshoot of his Virgin empire focused on space tourism, Virgin Galactic has been increasingly getting in on the satellite game. The Washington Post reports:

Virgin already has signed a $4.7 million contract with NASA to launch more than a dozen experimental satellites on a test flight. And it also has a deal with OneWeb, which plans to build a global Internet satellite system, for 39 satellites with an option for 100 more.

Branson talked up the quick satellite turnaround time that using a plane launch would make possible. “If you’re waiting for one of these giant rockets to put small satellites into space, you sometimes have to wait six months, or a year,” he said at the Cosmic Girl event. By contrast, a Virgin Galactic mothership could theoretically be good to go with 24 hours of notice. The payoffs could be huge.

Branson says he wants to use the LauncherOne rocket and satellite systems to help extend Internet and communication services to unconnected communities. This would mean creating new markets for Virgin, of course, but it’s also a laudable humanitarian goal. And Virgin announced in September that it will increase the payload weight that LauncherOne can handle, which would put it into competition for insanely lucrative government satellite launch contracts—like the ones that SpaceX have been going after for so long.

A similar mode of “air launch” is also the mechanism behind flying Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, the long-simmering experimental craft designed to ferry space-loving tourists. SpaceShipTwo crashed last year in testing, resulting in the death of a pilot, and Virgin is at work on a new craft. But with the addition of Cosmic Girl to the air launch fleet, Virgin’s satellite plans can continue to evolve, independent of SpaceShipTwo’s shadow.

[WaPo; Virgin Galactic]

LauncherOne image renderings via Virgin

The drops of silicon oil bobbing in this mesmerizing video do more than create aesthetically satisfying ripples across a slick surface. They could be indirect evidence of an alternate solution to a nagging question in quantum mechanics — one that dates back almost a century.

The video is among the winners of this year’s Gallery of Fluid Motion, an annual competition of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics. It stems from a 2013 experiment performed by MIT physicists Daniel Harris and John Bush that provided a toy model for so-called “pilot waves”: hypothetical ripples in space-time that could carry subatomic particles along like so many buoys bobbing on a watery surface.

At the 1927 Solvay conference, French physicist Louis de Broglie first proposed the existence of pilot waves as an alternative to the troubling notion of a wave function. You know the drill; it’s the essence of Schroedinger’s famous cat paradox. All possible outcomes exist in a superposition of states, described by an equation called the wave function (aka the cat is alive and dead at the same time). When a measurement is made (we look in the box), it causes the wave function to collapse into a single state (the cat is either alive or dead).

In his pilot wave theory, de Broglie suggested replacing the wave function with two equations: “one describing a real, physical wave, and another tying the trajectory of an actual, concrete particle to the variables in that wave equation, as if the particle interacts with and is propelled by the wave rather than being defined by it,” Natalie Wolchover wrote in Quanta last year.

Pilot waves have never been directly observed, but experiments over the last ten years involving bouncing oil droplets over vats of vibrating liquid have revived interest in de Broglie’s idea. Toss a pebble into a pond and it will produce rippling waves traveling outward.

The same thing happens in the droplet experiments, with a twist: if the vibrations are tuned to just the right frequency — i.e., close to the droplet’s natural resonance frequency — there will be an intriguing interference effect. Not only does the droplet produce ripples as it bounces, but it can interact with those ripples, and this will affect its trajectory. That’s the pilot wave concept in a nutshell: just replace the droplet with a subatomic particle.

Apart from the implications for quantum mechanics, this is also a very cool fluid dynamics experiment. To create their video, Harris and Bush filled a shallow tray with a circular trough in the center with silicon oil and mounted it on a vibrating stand. Then they tuned the stand to various frequencies and watched to see how the droplets’ behavior changed around a specific threshold frequency. As I wrote last year:

Above that threshold, the roiling sea of waves will interfere with the droplet’s walk. Below it, the surface remains smooth except for the waves produced by the bouncing droplet. The closer one tunes the vibrations to that threshold, the more robust and long-lived the generated pilot waves will be.

When the bouncing droplet produced waves, those waves bounced off the walls and interfered with each other, producing pretty interference patterns. They also affected the trajectory of the droplet. At first it looked like it was bouncing along randomly, but over time (around 20 minutes), the droplet was far more likely to drift towards the center of the circle, and increasingly less likely to be found in the rippling rings spreading out from that center.

The basic experimental set-up involves a loudspeaker, a smart phone, and a screen with a striped pattern. Then the fun begins. We see first one, two, three, and four bouncing droplets, each creating ripples in the silicon oil, followed by a series of droplets arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice. The researchers next used a high-speed camera to create some nifty strobing effects: in one version, the droplet appears to glide across the surface of the oil; in another, the droplet appears to gain “hang time,” pausing just a little bit longer mid-air with every bounce.

You can check out the other winners featured in the 2015 Gallery of Fluid Motion here.

AMC’s The Walking Dead is such a popular show, sometimes it’s easy to forget it’s based on a comic book. Even though the characters we know and love got started on the page, seeing them in that medium is still fun, especially through the eyes of Kirk Manley.

Manley is an artist who does comic-inspired art based on episodes of The Walking Dead. He even did the poster for the upcoming Walker Stalker Con, which takes place December 4 through 6 at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in New Jersey.

Here are just a few examples of his great work. Head to his Deviant Art page for more.

[Deviant Art]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

It’s common knowledge that Death Stars are wildly expensive weapons of mass destruction. What we didn’t know—until now—is that destroying two of them would bankrupt the Galactic Empire. Apparently Luke and his small band of Rebels didn’t crunch the numbers, either.

Like it or not, that’s the sobering conclusion of a new analysis of the economic fallout of the Death Stars’ destruction performed by financial engineering professor Zachary Feinstein. Feinstein’s paper, aptly titled “It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill,” can be read in its entirety on arXiv. Here’s the long and short of it.

Although others have worked out the cost of building a Death Star before, Feinstein decided to start from scratch, estimating the amount of steel and other raw materials required to build the planet-destroying weapon. After factoring in research and development, he arrived at a total cost of $419 quintillion dollars for both Galactic war machines.

That figure may sound mind-boggling, but we should remember that Emperor Palpatine had an entire Galactic Empire’s worth of assets at his disposal. Feinstein, for his part, was more interested in learning how the Imperial banking system would respond if the largest construction project in the Galaxy was suddenly destroyed. Popular Science explains his findings:

Following logic stitched together from prequels and Wookiepedia, we get a galactic banking sector with assets that are 60 percent of the gross galactic domestic product. [Feinstein calculates the Galactic GDP to be roughly $4.6 sextillion per year.]

Since these banks are likely heavily invested in the Empire itself and the Death Star specifically, the destruction of one Death Star by intergalactic terrorists and the collapse of the Empire following the destruction of the second, would devastate the galactic markets, and create a financial crisis on a truly massive scale.

Without significant cash on hand to bail out the crumbling financial system—and from the size and shape of Ackbar’s fleet I think it’s safe to assume the Rebels were operating on a shoestring—Feinstein concludes that the Alliance’s assault on Sith authority would have precipitated an economic disaster of “astronomical proportions.”

We can only assume the ever-scheming Palpatine is smiling from beyond the grave.

[Read the full paper at arXiv h/t Popular Science]

Follow the author @themadstone

Top image: Lucasfilm

You’ve admired Dave Seeley’s art in the past, whether you realize it or not. He’s done cover art for so many space opera and military science fiction books, his gorgeous style is synonymous with cool action. And now there’s a whole book of his thrilling artworks.

We’re stoked to be able to share some exclusive images from The Art of Dave Seeley, a fancy art book from Insight Editions. In addition to some book covers you’re bound to recognize, Seeley has also done art for Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Aliens vs. Predator. Some of the cheesecake art in the book is a little too, er, emphatic for my taste (although I got nuthin’ against pin-up art, generally), but his spaceships and mechs are generally top notch. See for yourself!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Dave-S...

The Art of Dave Seeley is available now!

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane

Our robots are equipped tools that leave behind distinctive marks on the fourth planet from the Sun. Here’s how those tools have changed over time to leave a more lasting impression on Mars, and what we can expect from the robots of the future.

Nuzzles from Sojourner

The Pathfinder Lander’s deployable mini-rover Sojourner was equipped with a spectrometer to determine rock composition, but didn’t have any fancy tools to collect samples. Instead, it bumped up against points of interest and carefully deployed its instrument kit against the rocks. Although it might have left marks on Mars, its tiny tire tracks caused far more of a fuss than its tools.

Rock Abrasion from the Opportunity and Spirit Rovers

An abraded circle at the London target inside Endurance Crater from June 2004. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell

The Opportunity and Spirit rovers are each equipped with a simple abrasion tool designed to grind away surface layers. This is enough to expose a fresh, unweathered surface in a circle 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) in diameter, and offer the smallest possible glance into the rock’s interior. The rovers left behind a trail of shallow marks, just enough to expose fresh rock. Yet like the breadcrumbs of Hansel and Gretel, their trails were likely quickly erased behind them by scouring wind.

Scoop and Rasp from the Phoenix Mars Lander

Shallow holes cut into icy soil at Snow White in July 2008. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

The Phoenix Mars Lander brought a motorized rasp to the north pole of Mars. It scraped clear an area with the front-edge blade of the scoop, then used the rasp to penetrate even-harder frozen soil. The four-by-four rasp array created a grid of holes 5 centimeters (2 inches) wide; the 3 cubic centimeters (half teaspoon) of material was collected into the scoop. Concentrated all in one location ringing the lander’s fixed position, these shallow marks might still remain sheltered from the wind by the robot’s bulk, but they, too, will slowly fade over time.

Brush and Drill by the Curiosity Mars Rover

Full-depth drillhole and preliminary mini-hole at John Klein in February 2013. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The Curiosity Rover brushes dust off of rocks, then drills into them. Flutes on the drillbit pull tailings up to the surface, providing easily-accessible powder for sieving and feeding into an onboard sampling suite. The drillhole is 1.6 centimeters (0.63 inches) wide and up to 6.4 centimeters (2.5 inches) deep. These are the first serious marks we’ve left on Mars, holes deep enough that they could qualify as geological vandalism. Although too widely spaced to make a traceable trail, these drillholes scream loudly that something artificial was here.

Although loaded with different scientific equipment, the yet-unnamed Mars 2020 Rover will have the same chassis so will be leaving behind a very similar trail of holes on the surface.

The Tools of the Future

The InSight Lander launching in 2016 will be taking these piddly little scratches at the surface and amping them up with our first-ever subsurface exploration. Along with surface seismic probes, the lander is equipped with a heat flow probe that will be hammered meters deep into the planet. While only a single hole, it will also be the deepest mark we’ve left on Mars.

Top image: Toolmarks from Opportunity rover’s rock abrasion tool [left]; the Phoenix lander’s rasp [center]; and the Curiosity rover’s drill [right]. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Humans clearly have a trash problem on Earth, but our track record isn’t that much better in outer space, where tens of thousands of stray debris fragments whip around the planet at rip-roaring speeds, posing a very serious danger to astronauts and satellites.

Many ideas have been tossed out to deal with our orbital trash, including space-grade fishing nets and laser-telescopes. The latest so-crazy-it-might-just-work scheme? An autonomous space trash bot that sucks up junk and vaporizes it for propulsion.

It’s still very theoretical, but the concept, which appeared in a recent paper on arXiv, is pretty intriguing in that the trash bot would require no external source of propulsion. In its current design, the engine would catch small pieces of debris (<4 inches) that aren’t easy to get a fix on with a laser but still pose a big danger to orbital infrastructure. (According to the ESA, even a <1-inch nugget of junk could pack the punch of a hand grenade.) Trash would then be fed to a ball mill, a coffee grinder-esque contraption that uses abrasion-resistant pellets to pulverize everything into a fine powder.

Conceptual model of the space junk engine, via Lan et al. 2015

That powder is then fed into a charging system, which heats it into a roiling mess of plasma. From that plasma, positively charged ions are separated and accelerated to high energies to generate thrust. Each time the bot swallows some food, it gets a little kick, propelling it onward toward its next space meal.

Of course, there are still some big issues to work out: For one, while the craft wouldn’t need propellant, its vacuum-cleaner-coffee-grinder trash-to-energy system still requires a power source. What’s more, the thrust the spacecraft produces depends on the density of debris, and you might imagine a situation where the trash bot, having cleared the surrounding area, suddenly finds itself marooned.

Personally, I’m hoping to see a combination of these ideas make it past the concept phase in the next few years. The orbital trash problem is only getting worse, and an environmental cleanup effort involving giant lasers, space fishing, and autonomous vacuum cleaners is something I think we’d all like to see.

[Read the full paper at arXiv h/t MIT Tech Review]

Follow the author @themadstone

Top image: Artist’s impression of debris swirling around the earth, via ESA–P. Carril

Last night’s big live production of The Wiz on NBC was pretty much flawless—we loved all the performances, including all the classic numbers. Here’s my fav bit—when they go into the Emerald City and everybody is doing a version of Madonna’s “Vogue.”*

This is totally how I’m going to picture the Emerald City from now on, complete with cool ravey outfits. Want a complete run down of the awesomeness that was The Wiz Live? Check out Jezebel’s liveblog from last night.

* Edited to add: As many, many people have schooled me about, that’s not Madonna’s “Vogue.” She got it from black LGBT dancers, who were doing it in the 80s. Apologies for the dumb shorthand on my part!

Life aboard a ship in the 18th or 19th century—especially in the far north or south—was treacherous. Now, the records of these brutal voyages are playing a surprising role in scientists’ efforts to understand the future of the planet.

If you’ve ever read In the Kingdom of Ice, which chronicles the race to the North Pole, or Endurance, a record of Shackleton’s Antarctic voyage, you’ve heard about what life in these unexplored regions was like: Without the communications technology or technical gear of today, ships depended on only what they had. And, the logbooks, where captains and clerks kept track of information like weather and location, were absolutely critical.

1875: Images from the Nares Arctic expedition. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

There are hundreds of thousands of these logbooks, written by hand, and they contain billions of data points about climate from an era before conventional records were kept. They’re a goldmine for scientists trying to understand our changing planet, but there’s just one problem with using them: The handwritten script and the aging of the paper make it tough for computer vision algorithms to understand—so they have to be transcribed by hand.

That’s the goal behind Old Weather, a project that brings together scientists and archivists from Oxford, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s National Meteorological Services, and a handful of maritime museums where these records are kept. The idea is to put these logbooks online and ask people to help transcribe them through the internet, filling in some of the vast gaps in our understanding of the weather and climate. According to the NOAA, 21,000 people have helped transcribe more than seven million data points so far.

For example, you can annotate the logbooks from the USS Bear, a whaling ship from Scotland that actually helped in Arctic rescue missions:

Images: Old Weather

After all, our record of the climate doesn’t actually go back very far. In the US, the Smithsonian started keeping track of the weather in the 1850s. And we have some records from other countries around the same time. But there are no comprehensive records of global weather data, until the modern day... Except for the billions of records kept by ships that were criss-crossing the globe, regularly recording extraordinarily thorough data about the weather conditions for centuries. Old Weather wants to get those observations out of these crumbling books and into our climate models.

The project relaunched its website yesterday, with new logbooks and better tools for transcribing them online. It’s much easier to help them out now, and they hope that the redesign will attract more participants to the growing community. (“We have split them into shorter deployments of a year or two; so completing a voyage will be less of a commitment, and you’ll have a chance for a bit of shore leave now and again,” they write.)

“It isn’t about proving or disproving global warming,” the project’s coordinators explain. “We need to collect as much historical data as we can... To understand what the weather will do in the future, we need to understand what it did in the past.”

Lead image: Icebergs above “a sailing ship in Arctic waters,” from 1870. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Contact the author at kelsey@Gizmodo.com.