All posts tagged: luminous

New Scientist Book Club: Why I explore our inevitable love for robots in my novel Luminous

New Scientist Book Club: Why I explore our inevitable love for robots in my novel Luminous

Published by skeptic

A robot child goes missing in Silvia Park’s Luminous, the May read for the New Scientist Book Club d3sign/Getty Images In 2024, a joke became a headline: “Dog strollers outsell baby strollers in country with world’s lowest birth rate”. As our love for pets grows ever refined and luxurious, our ability to have children feels more strained than ever. The usual milestones begin to look like mirages in a world that is economically and environmentally fraught, and increasingly disrupted by AI. In my acknowledgments for Luminous, I mention that the novel started out as a children’s book. A death in the family changed its course. There was a particularly rough stretch when someone close to me died each year, one after another, three, four years in a row. What I didn’t say is which death started the domino effect. It was the death of my dog. Frail, with silky fur and long-lashed eyes, he was the kind of lovely that turned heads. He was also very cranky. He disliked children. But despite his dignified, aloof …

New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Luminous by Silvia Park

Published by skeptic

Seoul – the setting for Silvia Park’s Luminous – at night Sean Pavone/Shutterstock That summer was immortal. July was especially savage with sixty-two heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today’s heat. Then the monsoons came. Undeterred, hundreds of Red Devil fans flooded the World Cup Stadium, waving flags of their reunified nation. Their dreams vaporized after the first round. Mexico: 7, United Republic of Korea: 0. The very next day, the sky cleared. A white sun buttered a salvage yard with rust while an old bomb-disposal unit, the Grumman A-1, moved in a figure eight. It cleared the path for a young girl named Ruijie, who was dragging the body of a woman by the ankles, naked arms thrown back as if shouting hooray. The woman might have been beautiful once. Lips pink and plush, and …

Luminous Lumley | Radio Times

Luminous Lumley | Radio Times

Published by Daniella Wilson

Add Amandaland and Conversations From a Long Marriage to your collection Dame Joanna Lumley is talking make-up. We’re discussing her birthday in early May, when she will be turning 80 (I know, look at her, ridiculous!), and the words just pop out from me: “Well, if you’ve had work done, it’s bloody good!” The radiant apparition peers into the camera and says: “No, look closely… I’ve got a sort of regular face, if you know what I mean, and my make-up is like drawing on a face. “I put it on to see you,” she adds, “because if I didn’t you’d think, a) I hadn’t tried, and b), ‘Gosh, she looks a bit washed out!’” It was as a model in the 1960s that La Lumley learnt how to create different looks. “It was less frantically expensive then,” she explains, “and less in your face, less always saying, ‘You’ll die if you don’t have these peptides’ and how, in 20 seconds, your whole face could look like a child!” In that era, she says, models …

Two excellent new sci-fi novels, Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Parker, tackle robots in very different ways

Two excellent new sci-fi novels, Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Parker, tackle robots in very different ways

Published by skeptic

Do we relate better to stories about robots with faces and bodies? Carlos Castilla/Alamy Ode to the Half-BrokenSuzanne Palmer, Daw Books LuminousSylvia Park, Magpie Robots and whether they will one day deserve to be treated like people – or destroy humanity, or both – have interested writers for well over a century now. In the real world, the robot threat appears to involve the uses of artificial intelligence in misinformation and more direct forms of warfare such as drone attacks. In the world of literature, however, many writers focus on individual robots. Maybe giving the AI a body and a face simply helps tell your story better to creatures with bodies and faces. Fictional robots have a lot going for them. They can be funny, cool or sexy. They can be nerdy and a bit depressed. Some represent “the other”, a test of how humane we are. They can also help us think about concepts of ownership that may apply to our treatment of pets or farm animals. And they can be terrifying killing machines. …

Tessa Rose Jackson: The Lighthouse review – grief, grace and memory in a luminous folk rebirth | Folk music

Tessa Rose Jackson: The Lighthouse review – grief, grace and memory in a luminous folk rebirth | Folk music

Published by Sam Flores

The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory. The artwork for The Lighthouse by Tessa Rose Jackson. The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in The Bricks That Make the Building, a sweet, psych-folk jewel which meditates on “the earth that feeds the garden / The breath that helps the child sing” and Gently Now, which begins in soft clouds of birdsong, then tackles how growing older can cosset the process …