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In May, I mentioned that I really enjoyed seeing serious species diversity in science fiction.

In September, I was at MICE and saw a comic that so well implemented this I had to buy it immediately. Sean Wang's Runners is about the crew of a merchant spaceship taking on legally questionable jobs, and they're all entirely different species. So far there have been about three human characters in the whole series, one near-human (the kind of thing makeup can simulate), a wide variety of humanoids, and a fair number of totally strange things. Character-wise everyone is very relatable (this is not a series that delves too deeply into nonhuman psychology) and the plot is fun and exciting. Recommended.

Loren Sherman's Circular Gallifreyan is a way to write English and other languages using Roman letters, inspired by the Gallifreyan language as depicted in set dressing on the new Doctor Who series.

It's effectively an abjad, with large circles representing consonants and small circles modifying those to follow them with vowels. Consonants are distinguished by their position relative to the word-circle and by how many dots or lines are associated with them, while vowels are based on position on the consonant-circle and direction of an optional line (for U and I).

Wonderfully, aside from a loose direction in some cases there is no constraint on where the lines go, and you're encouraged to find ways to connect one letter to another, even across words. This gives sentences a fantastic interconnected look, making the writing system appear to be much more complicated than it is. (I like imagining that actual Time Lords writing this already know where the other end of the lines are going and can write this in any order.)

This writing system does a great job of simulating the graphics from the show while still fully encoding Roman text, and it's beautiful.

Coming up with my own postscript code to write this has been fun. I'm particularly happy with the inter-word line code, which uses setmatrix to take the current point back into the sentence's reference frame and saves the coordinates in order to connect them all up at the end.

Also, deciphering the short sentence at the top of the Writing Guide was a well-done surprise.

I really like seeing a range of species in SFF.

The Raksura series by Martha Wells particularly stands out for fantasy. Everyone's basically humanoid but I'm not sure any humans appear. Instead there are characters with horns, spines, scales, a rainbow of skin colors, etc. I feel like this is particularly suited for fantasy since there doesn't need to be a reason that everyone's humanoid and you can avoid language questions.

For science fiction I think that a mixed-species setting should go beyond the Star Trek/Star Wars humanoids, though obviously budget issues come up for live-action media. David Brin's Uplift stories do a pretty good job here, as do Phil Foglio's Buck Godot/Gallimaufry comics.

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Explanatory pdf

I just finished reading Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. As the world goes to hell in the 2040s, a billionaire exactly my age gives his inheritance to whoever can learn enough 1980s trivia and puzzle-solving/game-playing skill to find the easter egg hidden in the MMO that ate the internet. A real '80s movie of a book, with humor and danger and romance. Recommended.

( Here be spoilers and complaints. )
I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on it (and will probably go searching for reviews now).

In Stanislaw Lem's book The Cyberiad, the main characters are two constructors, almost-omnipotent robots in a posthuman world. In their sixth sally, they are captured by the pirate Pugg, a robot with a head covered in eyes who has an insatiable hunger for information. He demands they tell him everything they know before he releases them.

To defeat him, they create a Demon of the Second Kind, which lets only true facts out of a random data source. Pugg starts reading with gusto, only to soon realize that most of these facts are totally useless. At first he hopes that great secrets of the universe will be related at any moment, but soon he is buried in information which his many eyes can't help but take in (as the heroes sneak away).

I was naturally reminded of my current information-acquisition tactics - twitter, lj/dw, rss feeds, etc. There's a lot of good information there but plenty of useless nonsense too. I need to remember to filter agressively, lest I end up crushed under a mountain of facts like the Pirate Pugg.