David Langford

That might be a bit of an overreaction. But I will concede this is a close as I've ever seen this get to reality: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html Which is really sequel to the short story: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm , and which is followed up with http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/ (the "FAQ" I linked above is in between those two things).

David Langford had a really great FAQ about this technology over on the comp.basilisk FAQ newsgroup: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

Nick Lowe, in The Well-Tempered Plot Device, is quite brutal in his criticisms. https://ansible.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html

There's an FAQ about these things: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

I'm reminded of David Langford's "basilisks": http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm [edit] more in the series: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/

A bit of a tangent here, but anyone intrigued by the notion of hacking the brain using optical illusions should read "comp.basilisk FAQ": http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

I'd also encourage people to read David Langford's book, The Leaky Establishment, which is definitely not in any way based on his experiences working at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, aka the UK's atom bomb factory, in the 1980s; it says so right in the dedication at the front: http://ansible.uk/books/leaky.html It tells the story of how our hero smuggles a discarded filing cabinet home with him one day, only to discover that someone has popped a plutonium warhead into the bottom drawer while he wasn't looking; he spends the rest of the book trying to smuggle it back in again. Spheres play a key role.

For those of you interested in science fiction whose interest was piqued by this comment, here's some required reading: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

http://ansible.uk/sfx/sfx039.html 'She looked on him. Never before in her life had she seen such a male. He made even Gunther seem a lesser man. Her imagination had not even dreamed that such a man could exist. The men she had known earlier, even Gunther, had been no intimation that there might be males such as these. Such men, she thought, could not exist in her time. In her time there was no place; there could be no place, for such men as these.' hahaha. This is why you google names before you pick them.

There's also a few sequels: http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/ And What Happened at Cambridge IV, which I can't find online.

Erm, you don't? I suggest you read the Basilisk FAQ before you get into real trouble... http://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html

FWIW, this phenomenon is not new under the sun. I observe that we are experiencing a McLuhan Tetrad retrieval of it via our modern ~ Internet media artifact. For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ... from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html > Eventually the authorized edition appeared with Tolkien's stern message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other." This was bad publicity for Ace, who eventually caved in, paid Tolkien royalties, and promised not to reprint. < also referring to this circumstance is a Library of Congress blog post: J.R.R. Tolkien – Paperbacks and Copyright November 24, 2014 by Margaret Wood https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-and-copyrig…