Wednesday, July 08, 2009

The Human Genre Project

One of the most unique offerings at SciFiction is Michael Swanwick's "Periodic Table of Science Fiction", which has a short short story linked to each element in the periodic table. It starts with "The Hindenburg" for Hydrogen (atomic number 1) and continues all the way through "Now You See It Now You" for Ununoctium (atomic number 118). I don't think it's surprising that some of the bits work better than others, but it's a clever concept.

Inspired by Swanwick, Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, writer in residence at The Genomics Forum, has has put together The Human Genre Project. It looks like each of the 22 autosomal and X and Y chromosomes can have more than one entry. That's appropriate, since each carries multiple genes, and can affect many different human characteristics.

It's a work in progress - only 7 of the chromosomes have an entry - and you can still submit a contribution inspired by genes and genomics. If you need inspiration, you can explore each chromosome using the Human Genome Project's Chromosome Viewer.

If you don't want to scroll over each chromosomal image to find the stories, you can just use the Index of Human Genre Project stories by author.

Also, you can read the winners of the Genomics Network's short story competition, which aren't so much science fiction as fiction with science.

(via SF Signal)

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5 comments:

  1. Mishal9:16 AM

    Thank you for the links to the Genome Fiction, I remember the Periodic Table and as far as vignettes go, it's a cute idea.


    Out of curiosity though, do you know your current ads are for Scientology?

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  2. Mishal: Thanks for the heads up on the ads - I'm not seeing them, but some of the ads are targeted based on visitors' location. On the one hand, Scientology is indeed science fiction-related, on the other hand I don't want to look like I support them. I'll try and get them removed.

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  3. Mishal7:59 AM

    Anytime.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mishal8:01 AM

    Sorry for the double comment, if you've done anything, it appears to have taken. Now you're running Ads by Google for Bioinformatics Software and Sequence Analysis Tools.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous6:08 AM

    GREAT LA~~~ THX FOR YOUR INFORMATION

    ReplyDelete

I've turned on comment moderation on posts older than 30 days. Your (non-spammy) comment should appear when I've had a chance to review it.

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