cartography of cleverness

[adelaidesean]

From Physorg: Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world's first Map of Science:



Does such a thing exist for science fiction? (The empty spaces in the map above are both evocative and insufficient.) I hunted on Google but couldn't find anything. This seems a serious lapse. Surely some fanboy out there has found the time to do it!

Comments

[wistling.livejournal.com]

It almost looks yin-yang.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it does. I'd like a rotatable 3-D version.

[random-alex.livejournal.com]

I can see classics, and archaeology, and Asian studies... but no history! That makes no sense, surely?

It's very pretty though.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I wonder what definition of "science" they used?

Which makes me wonder what a map of all human endeavour would look like. The links between each node would be a nightmare to chart...

[random-alex.livejournal.com]

This is what I thought, and why I was confused!

A map of everything would have to come close to a Theory of Everything. That would be SO cool.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Imagine if the map was of a face, or a number, or matched a real place! That would be spooky as well as cool,

[random-alex.livejournal.com]

Now you're just being odd =D

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I think that might in the genes. ^_^

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Here's a verbal description of my pie-chart of science-fiction:

90% (red): Pointless, utterly-nonscientific drivel (this includes everything from series novels, particularly Star Wars novels, to all "military" sci-fi NOT written by Joe Haldeman)

4% (blue): sci-fi that deals with transhumanist technologies and/or sciences and how they bring up legitimate questions of *human identity (trans-, post-, ab-, poly-, etc.) and the ethics thereby entailed. (It's obvious that your work, Herr Williams, fits in here...except for maybe that Star Wars novel you did, but I haven't read it yet, so....)

1% (silver): neutronium-hard sci-fi that reads more like a physics textbook than a novel (I'm looking right at Greg Egan here) but keeps you intrigued simply because the ideas are so wondrous.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Yikes. By that filter, I have eight books in the red (doing my bit to dumb down SF), ten in the blue, and none in the silver. I'd put Peter Watts in there with Egan, btw. Have we talked about him before? I rate his books Blindsight and Starfish very highly indeed. Impossible to grok for anyone interested in mainstream literature, but, you know, we need guys like that too.

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Blue and Silver are actually combined into a metacategory that I called "Good Stuff." And, for that matter, some of the red can be at least entertaining--I mean, I love E. E. "Doc" Smith's goofy old Lensman books, and I have a thing for Warhammer 40,000 novels (a post-post-post-Singularity Dark Age of the Galaxy? Hell yeah!)--but the red is primarily reserved for authors like Catherine Asaro, the utterly inexcusable Elizabeth Bear, C. J. Cherryh, and Anne McAffery. Mind you, it's not composed exclusively of female authors, those are just four of the endless hacks who immediately come to my mind.

I think the red category should be divided into red and pink, with pink being "series trash and other such paperback shelf-filler that is nonetheless entertaining and fun to read."

Ohyeah, and I love Watts, too. Even though I find his views regarding the evolutionary survival value of sentience to be positively ridiculous. Blindsight was still an amazing read. Never really got into his "underwater" books, though. Not sure why, either. I have all of them, I've just never been able to get far in them.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I love Ian Watson's Warhammer 40,000 books. Must read them again one day.

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

I have this weird addiction to the Warhammer 40K universe. It's so incredibly rich and combines two of my all-time favorite fictional tropes: the Gothic and Oldskool Space Opera. I mean...the Adeptus Mechanicus. Post-Singular cyborg ecclesiarchs who believes the machinery requires a "machine-spirit" to function. I drool over those bastards, and I wonder why Black Library has yet to publish any novels specifically dealing with them.

I'm actually writing a series of stories set in the Warhammer 40K universe for publication on several fan-sites. They follow the Brothers Wincaster, Havelock and "Constantinus" 10-Opal, a seriously mismatched pair of psychos in the employ of the Inquisition...except that, well, Havelock is a scarred Metallican gunslinger who doesn't give a shit if he's working for the Emperor or Abaddon the Despoiler as long as he's getting paid in thrones and babes, and 10-Opal (his long-lost brother) is a crippled tech-priest whose brain is implanted with the plans of recreating the actual Omnissiah, the great Machine Intelligence from the Dark Age of Technology who actually founded the Mechanicum. So, yeah, they're both heretics working for the Inquisition, and the stories will probably end with the death of the God-Emperor Himself.

Remember...the Emperor's Golden Throne has an "off" switch.

[aidandoyle.livejournal.com]

That's really cool.

Another fun one is the Internet usage trends mapped onto the Tokyo subway map.
http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

That's really neat. I recall seeing one of nearby stars mapped onto a subway map as well, but can't remember where I saw it...

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ah! Here it is:
http://io9.com/5159954/a-map-of-the-galaxys-most+traveled-portal-stations

[gloripebbles.livejournal.com]

It's so very pretty was my first reaction. I like how music has landed in there.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

It looks a bit like an ant's face to me. All our science was telepathically beamed to us by some vast, insectile intelligence from outer space! Cool, huh?

(Maybe all our music too. Explains all that clicky ambient stuff I keep downloading, perhaps.)