Author: Cassandra Khaw

(credit: Detail from the cover of The Nightmare Stacks)

You can tell Charles Stross was a programmer before he became a science fiction writer. His acclaimed series The Laundry Files takes place in a universe besieged by interdimensional horrors and defined by applied mathematics. Here, programmers, computational scientists, and teenage hackers all run the constant risk of accidentally invoking the attention of brain-eating atrocities. Words are dangerous, but a clever application of numbers is worse.

In his 2008 novella Down on the Farm, which is part of The Laundry Files series, Stross explains the logic behind the world he's created: “If you think too hard about certain problems you might run the risk of carrying out a minor summoning in your own head. Nothing big enough or bad enough to get out, but… those florid daydreams? And the sick feeling afterwards because you can’t quite remember what it was about? Something in another universe just sucked a microscopic lump of neural tissue right out of your intraparietal sulcus, and it won’t grow back.”

But that is not always a problem. If you already have parasites in your brain, for example, it's possible to circumvent this dilemma. Stross' latest book, The Nightmare Stacks, continues to delve into the intricacies of The Laundry Files' world.

Plato believed mathematics was the highest form of beauty, being entirely concerned with universal truths and untarnished by base desire. Bertrand Russell described it as “a beauty cold and austere, sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” There have even been modern studies that posit that “beautiful” equations engage our brains the way paintings and music do. And Yoon Ha Lee’s stunning debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, makes all of this real.

The world of Ninefox Gambit is a perilous, conflict-riddled conglomeration of planets and factions, inhabited by the members of the ruling hexarcate and rebellious heretics. It is a place where war is “a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs” and “calendrical rot” can destabilize entire tracts of terrain. Though its setting may be complex, the novel's basic premise is relatively simple. A disgraced general, Cheris, seeks redemption by liberating a fortress that has been overtaken by enemy forces. To accomplish this, she does what all protagonists in her situation invariably do: allies herself with an unsavoury character. In this case, it's Jedao, an undead tactician who just so happens to be a mass murderer.

A fine piece of military fiction, Ninefox Gambit glitters with clever maneuvers and cunning ploys, heart-stopping action and hard decisions, all complicated by a repertoire of strange technologies. At the same time, Lee makes no excuses for violence and does not shy away from illuminating the grisly ramifications of war fought between people who often have more in common than they admit. “The Kel formation held as they butchered their way through the Eels," he writes. “Cheris made a point of noticing the Eels’ faces. They weren’t much different from the faces of her own soldiers: younger and older, dark skin and pale, eyes mostly brown or sometimes grey.”

There’s a common thread in Joe Hill’s works: one way or another, they all break your heart. Needless to say, The Fireman continues this gut-wrenching tradition.

A colossal read at 768 pages, the post-apocalyptic opus opens at the beginning of the end:

Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school.

The book doesn’t pull its punches. Even the prologue comes quick and sharp, with a feint and nasty uppercut. First, we’re introduced to our protagonist, Harper, a school nurse with some endearing idiosyncrasies, including a Mary Poppins lunchbox and a penchant for happy musicals. Then, while Harper fusses over a first-grader, The Fireman brings in the next act. A pathogen is blazing across the country. Its scientific name is Draco Incendia Trichophyton, but people just call it Dragonscale.

There’s a certain mystique to American motorways. Endless expanses of asphalt with nothing but the radio and the stars for company; a anonymous landscape of diners, truck stops, and ramshackle motels; flat plains that rise into mountainous ranges or dip into valleys lush with forests; a freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want. It’s no wonder that so much fiction pivots on the axis of the road trip.

However, such places can also be terrifying. It’s easy to get lost here, easy to vanish into that topography of intersections and one-pub towns, easy to meet the wrong person and be reduced to a missing person’s report. And this is where the new serial fiction podcast Alice Isn’t Dead finds us. Not in the potential of travel, but its worst outcome.

The basic premise of the show is simple: a truck driver is travelling the United States looking for the wife she’d assumed was dead. Because it shares a creator with the darkly comedic Welcome To Night Vale (which we absolutely love), you’d be forgiven if you expected something relatively humorous. I certainly did. But where the former is a mix of the macabre and the morbidly funny, the latter … isn’t.

Simulation games have always felt lonely to me, almost empty. For all of their enticements, their promises of endless adventure, they invariably fall short. Somewhere, somehow, something breaks the immersion, laying bare the machinery behind the curtains. It's never the virtual life advertised, just a simulacrum of a dream.

So, when the first mentions of farm-life simulator Stardew Valley bloomed on Twitter, I raised an eyebrow. It's been described as Harvest Moon crossed with Animal Crossing and Zelda, a love letter to the pastoral classics. But I'd been there, done that, and while I adored my time with Starbound—my last farming-type flirtation—it left me feeling as though I was a child with a diorama of talking action figures, rather than an extraterrestrial colony leader.

Nonetheless, circumstances led to the acquisition of the game, and I went ahead with it, sceptical at first, only to become completely infatuated by the end of the first growing season. Where other titles barrage you with features, with new twists, and new iterations on the latest big new idea, Stardew Valley asks you, both as your pixelated avatar and as the player, to breathe.

Minecraft is one of those things that is best described as a cultural phenomenon. Since it was first launched, the sandbox game has infiltrated virtually every available platform, spawned spin-offs, even been appropriated for use in an educational capacity. But it was only very recently that Mojang updated the game’s rather rudimentary combat system.

With version 1.9, players will no longer be able to protect themselves with a fusillade of clicks, but instead will need to consider cooldown delays. According to Kotaku, the faster you swing, the less damage you’ll inflict. Additionally, the update introduces shields, dual-wielding, and new weapon effects. Axes are now capable of “crushing” blows, while swords now have the capacity to deal “sweep” attacks. There are also new arrow types, new block varieties, a new critter, and an assortment of other changes. The challenge-starved can even re-summon the powerful Ender boss now, in order to reenact their battles over and over again. Check out the changelog for a full list of tweaks.

This is the first official update to significantly alter Minecraft’s combat system. (There are numerous fan mods that have done the same.) Previous versions were more concerned about introducing changes to the world and expanding the sandbox elements of the game.

The middle of the 20th century was an exciting time for science fiction, filled with experimentation and new ideas, an endeavour helmed by genre icons like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. If magazine, which ran between 1952 and 1974, played home to many of these names along with a myriad of now-historic work. And now, it’s all available for free in a variety of file formats.

According to BoingBoing, all 176 issues of If have been made available via the Internet Archive, including the ones edited by Hugo Award-winning Frederik Pohl. His greatest contribution to the magazine was, perhaps, the introduction of the "If-first" series, which showcased new authors. A number of these writers went on to become extremely well-known, most notably Larry Niven, who published his first story in the magazine.

What’s really interesting about If, however, is how its content parallels the optimism of the era. At the time, science was exciting, not dystopian—a gateway into new possibilities. Even as Russia and the United States rushed to be the first to put a man on the Moon, the world dreamt in unison of a better tomorrow. The stories in If reflected this sensibility to some extent, being very much action-packed and sometimes even geared towards a younger audience.

Mova is not a name that many might have heard of, but the facial animation technology has been used extensively in many blockbuster movies, most recently the record-breaking Deadpool. And according to The New York Times, Mova is now sitting in the middle of a legal battle.

Californian technology incubator Rearden has countersued Shenzhenshi Haitiecheng Science and Technology Company, after the Chinese company sued Rearden the February before. Both entities are claiming ownership over Mova, which has been used in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and even Gravity.

The New York Times goes into some detail about the convoluted history of the technology. Steve Perlman, who founded Rearden, had also founded a gaming start-up called OnLive, which he merged with Mova. After leaving OnLive in 2012, he attempted to acquire Mova from the company’s controlling investor. Here is where it gets complicated. As Perlman explained in the legal suit, he asked an employee named Greg LaSalle to manage the process, only to have the latter sell the assets to Digital Domain, which is in turn associated with Shenzhenshi.

Volkswagen is reportedly being called to make restitution for the recent diesel emissions cheat scandal, which has severely clouded the car giant's reputation.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has asked VW to produce electric vehicles in its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, according to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (via Google translate). The car maker has also apparently been told to develop a network of charging stations.

However, the EPA and Volkswagen were tight-lipped about any such plans. VW told Reuters that its talks with the regulator were continuing. But the company declined to comment on specific details when quizzed.

Warning: this review contains spoilers, but also effusive praise.

Gravity Falls is a clever, clever show.

And by that, I’m talking about how it succeeds at introducing cosmic horror in a format palatable to Disney audiences, while simultaneously keeping all of its teeth intact. At a glance, it’s an extremely safe production. The characters are clearly cartoonish, designed without a single thought towards realism. Proportions are off, expressions are goofy, and while everything is of high quality, Gravity Falls is unmistakably a thing for kids.