Now, I don’t want to brazenly name-drop … actually, scratch that, yes I do. I was hanging out in The Wastelands in Second Life last night with a bunch of my neighbours, when Integral Danton (who is probably better known to most of you as comics writer Warren Ellis) dropped by wearing a rather impressive outfit.

Click through for the larger size – that’s Mr. Danton on the right. Despite the fact that he’d been preceded by someone turning up in a dragon avatar with full fire-breathing capabilities, everyone present with a bit of a science fiction background recognised (and was fairly impressed by) his outfit – a stillsuit, as per Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

It turns out that some people have put together a sim entirely based on the Dune universe. I popped over there to get some photos, but it turns out it’s a very hardcore roleplay sim, and I didn’t have the time or motivation to read and absorb the huge list of rules of conduct that would have been necessary for me to venture in without pissing off the natives. I may well pop by over the weekend for a better look, but if you want to see for yourself, just do a place search in-world for ‘Dune Project’. However, work on the theory that if you haven’t read the Dune novels, it’s not going to mean an awful lot to you.

Just as a side note, memes from meatspace have a way of bleeding through into the metaverse, too. Let’s just hope no one from the Boston Police Department visits The Wastelands any time soon…

Via the inimitable Jason Stoddard comes news of a genre fiction con that anyone with a serious interest in promoting their writing should consider attending – if only for the fact that the magazine sponsoring it has a claimed readership of 5 million (yes, million) people.

Of course, the Chengdu convention, like the magazine in question (Science Fiction World), is based in China, which may put it out of your financial league – unless you plan to bolt it on to your attendance at this year’s Worldcon in Japan, in which case the power of my searing jealousy will keep you awake for weeks to come.

But fear not, my economically-challenged friends! Because they’re planning on running the Chengdu convention virtually in Second Life in parallel with the meatspace version, which means the financial issues aren’t anywhere near as bad as they could be if you have access to a broadband internet connection and a reasonably pokey computer.

I assure you that I’m going to be there with bells on – and hopefully by then I’ll have my own little patch of SL land developed enough to entertain visitors who tire of panels …

I was hanging around in Second Life last night, and gatecrashed a bunch of people chatting about Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin (which I have yet to read, so I mostly listened to what everyone else was saying).

Inevitably someone brought up the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, and someone else mentioned that he’d not only been to Second Life, but been interviewed there too. The things you find out from random people that you’d have never thought to Google for, eh? So here’s a video of Vonnegut being interviewed in the metaverse.

Talking of Second Life, I’m considering buying a plot of land in The Junkyard. One just came free, and I’m looking into the financial considerations (which are quite low for a single small parcel, all things considered) before laying out some Lindens and begging Jason Stoddard and Co. to build me a cool hangout in keeping with the local ambiance …

… the local ambiance being very much post-apocalyptic, a la Mad Max. My kind of place. Pop by and visit – the locals have some diverting (and deadly) entertainments should you feel the urge to join in. Otherwise you can just wander around, chat to people and check out the scenery. And not have people try to sell you crap you don’t want, quite unlike a huge swathe of the rest of the metaverse.

Oh yeah; Warren Ellis has a new gaff in SL, which I also dropped in on. It’s called Winterstate. And being the sort of host who understands his client demographic, he’s laid on entertainment in the form of a set of zombie-infested tunnels for you to blow off steam in, should you wish – you’ll need to buy a gun elsewhere, but that’s not much of a chore. There are also little helicopters, and it snows a lot. Mr. Ellis wasn’t around at the time, regrettably.

Any VCTB-reading SL users, please friend me, because I still hardly know anyone. Just IM for Isambard Portsmouth.

It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. I’ve been threatening to get acquainted with SL for months now – I think I just found my motivation. Any regular visitors to the metaverse care to share some tips of good places to visit?

You materialise outside your house of impossible architecture, and find to your astonishment that it’s raining. It’s raining boxes. Small featureless cubes, decorated with frantically scrolling computer code, babbling pseudo-biblical gibberish as they cascade onto the landscape around you. Continue reading “Metaverse terrorism”

If the current trends of growth in ‘synthtic worlds’ such as Second Life and the multitude of MMORPGs continue, there will be a whole lot of new realities for people to explore from the comfort of their own armchairs. What future will science fiction have in an ever-expanding multiverse? Continue reading “Science fiction and the multiverse”

Second Life is really starting to hit the news properly now – it’s been a 1337-geek blogosphere darling for a little while, but some of the more mainstream outlets are picking it up. And as usual, they’re blowing it out of all proportion as it stands at the moment. But what about in a few decades’ time? Continue reading “A second chance at life”

The first to inhabit any new frontier are the pioneers, the early adopters. But it never takes long for the commercial interests to follow suit, seeing opportunity in the form of a space uncluttered by competitors. Continue reading “A new world of opportunities”

There’s a lot of talk about virtual environments these days, largely due to the proliferation of online roleplaying games. The futurists (myself included) see a harbinger of new worlds being created, ouside the ‘meatspace’ of reality, but just as alive. Continue reading “Playing God”

Man, I’ve been badly slack on posting here, apart from the link dumps. What can I say, I’ve been a busy person. But today I saw a little gem of a post about the economics of online games and I have half an hour to spare…  Continue reading “Online economies reach across the divide”