Author: AlWilliams
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Google’s Latest AI and “Last Men Standing”
Last Men Standing appeared in Nature Futures last month, and it had some awesome title art by Jacey. I’m no artist, but I have enjoyed asking AI to produce some scenes from the story, just for fun. Given the legal climate, I wouldn’t use any of these images commercially, but they are fun to experiment…
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Great Advice for SciFi Writers
An Oldie but a Goodie Helen de Cruz wrote an interesting post I wished I had found a few years ago about publishing science fiction. Like many of us, she went down the path of getting a lot of rejections and taking perhaps too much writing advice. I was lucky to get some very nice…
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Last Men Standing Appears in Nature Futures
But if you don’t get Nature Futures, you better hurry! Very happy to announce that my story “Last Men Standing” came out in Nature Futures recently. Futures is part of the Journal, Nature. If you are with a large company or school, you probably have access. If not, possibly your library. However, they let you…
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Why Are Robots Often Humanoid?
More often than not, robots in science fiction are human-looking, at least to some extent. Why? It seems to me that the biggest reason is that all science fiction is really about humans or aspects of humans. So C3PO and Data aren’t really robots. They are reflections of our human behavior. On the more practical…
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Help Wanted: Lost (and Confused) in Alien Translation
It is handy that nearly all the aliens we see on TV, in movies, or even in books speak English or, at least, some human language. Farscape had “magic microbes” that let everyone understand each other (and, apparently, made you think their lips were moving appropriately, too). Star Trek had the universal translator, but you…
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The Death of James T. Kirk
I’m not one to write fan fiction, but as an author, you always think about how you might have written something on the page or on the screen. One thing that really gripes me is how they killed off Kirk in Generations. The movie came out in 1994, so I’m going to assume you don’t…
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Welcome to Read Planet!
You know, like “Yesterday I read a book.” Red planet, not “reed” planet… nevermind. If you know me, it is probably through my technical writing on Hackaday.com, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, or a slew of other magazines articles and books I’ve written over the years. If you don’t know me, well, that’s not surprising either. As…