Sunday August 23

10:00-10:50AM (Eastern Daylight Time)

Moderator: Working on this, but this may be a self-directed panel

Panelists:  Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer, Gadi Evron, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Description:   Artificial Intelligence: The Real Minority Report?

Many thanks to Rashid Ashraf for providing the covers.

https://vimeo.com/434735548

The book is available for download at the web archive.

Here is the official announcement from SFRA.

Dear SFRA,

Unfortunately I must write you today with the news that our planned meeting for July 2020 has been cancelled due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. While both the executive committee and the organizers were still deliberating over the best course of action, the final decision was made by Indiana University Bloomington, which has cancelled all events on its campus through the summer.

The executive committee would like to thank the conference’s local organizers, Rebekah Sheldon and De Witt Douglas Kilgore, for all their hard work in organizing this conference, and offer them the regret of the entire organization that we will not be able to meet with them at IU this year.

In terms of the financial health of SFRA, we want you to know that the outlook for the organization as a result of this cancellation is not dire; we will not directly lose any money on the cancelled conference itself. Given that historically our membership renewals congregate tightly around conference registration, however, we do anticipate a rather dramatic decline in member numbers for this year. We ask — and, we expect, will certainly ask again this summer and fall — that, if you are able, that you please consider renewing your membership with SFRA despite this cancellation.

Either way, we wish you all good health, safety, and security wherever you are in these strange times.

Gerry Canavan
SFRA President

The award winning British-Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid, published a short story on an Alien Invasion in Financial Times which was quite well received. Here is an excerpt from the story:

A hot wind rattles the roof of our shanty. Corrugated metal bucks up and down, scrabbling against rough-hewn tops of thin walls, straining at threaded wires that bind it into place. Like some kind of monster.

“It’s just a rumour,” I say.

“Put on your spectacles,” Mother tells me.

“We’ve been hearing it for months.”

“This is different, Daughter. Put on your spectacles.”

I have an old-style pair. Big, black, bookish. Retro. I’ve been told they suit my face. Make me look like a character from the past. I prefer them because they’re tough. And easy to slide off. Unlike Mother’s lenses, which just sit there, stuck to her eyeballs, from when she wakes until she’s ready to sleep.

Plus specs don’t cause infections.

Mother’s right. I see it coming through on all the media. Broadcast, narrowcast. Chatter histograms.

“The smoothies are up to something,” she says. “First they deny everything. They’ve been denying it all along. And then, suddenly, everyone agrees. It’s confirmed. There are aliens here.”

The wind dies for a moment and I can hear the murmur of the milking machine, flared tubes of transparent plastic tugging at Mother.

“It doesn’t sound like they’re friendly,” I say.

“Can you find pictures?”

I’ve been trying. “No. I’m getting blocked.”

You can read the rest of the story  Mohsin Hamid here

The Custodian: Who was Sellem? What do we know so far about his personal history and education?

Professor Dionisius Agius: Sellem bin al-Sheikh Mansur was a Muslim astrologer from Cairo who was captured by the Knights of St John, based in Malta. His father, Al-Sheikh Mansur, was an astrologer in Cairo. Sellem spent some time as a galley slave rowing on the Order of St John’s ships, but by 1605 he was no longer able to do this. As the result of an accident, his legs were injured and he was only able to walk with crutches. In 1605, he was living in the slaves’ prison in Valletta, the new capital of Malta and seems to have made money by acting as a healer.

In the spring and summer of 1605, several Maltese Christians denounced Sellem to the Inquisition for practising magic. The Inquisition was responsible for policing matters of religious deviance among Christians, including magic and “superstition”. Sellem, a Muslim, came to their attention because he was deemed to be leading Christians astray. Many of the denunciations were made by ordinary people who claimed that Sellem had performed magic for them to solve everyday problems: Giuseppe Martelli asked Sellem for love magic after his fiancée refused to marry him, while Marco Mangion had approached Sellem for medicine when he was ill and thought he had been bewitched. But Sellem was also accused of other, more unusual and learned types of magic.

The architect Vittorio Cassar, a Knight of Malta, claimed that Sellem taught him a form of divination called geomancy, which involved drawing dots in random patterns to answer questions about the future (in Arabic called khatt-er-raml). Cassar also gave the Inquisitors the geomancy treatises that he claimed to have written under Sellem’s direction, and we can see that Sellem who possessed one wrote his name on them in Arabic. This is now being studied by Dr Liana Saif. Furthermore, Cassar claimed that Sellem had offered to teach him a form of magic called reuchania (Arabic ruhaniyya) which involved the calling up of demons. Later witnesses went further and said Sellem had called up demons for them, reciting incantations from a magic book.

The trial document, now preserved in the Cathedral Archives in Mdina, Malta includes detailed testimony from these witnesses and Sellem’s replies to their accusations. Dr Alex Mallett [another member of the research team] is transcribing, translating the trial, and writing an extensive commentary. In doing so, it gives us a great deal of information about magic and everyday life in seventeenth-century Malta. Sellem admitted to practising healing and love magic for some clients, although he said that he did not really know about magic and his spells were “jokes” or fakes, which he made up to earn money from gullible Christians. He also admitted to teaching Cassar geomancy, and told the Inquisition that he had learned astrology from his father in Cairo. However, he repeatedly denied knowing anything about how to call up demons and said he had never owned a magical book. Even when the Inquisition put him face to face with his accusers and used torture, he denied these more serious and demonic forms of magic.

The full interview is available here.

0Time Code is the story of a paramilitary group that ventures into a virtual world using technology that can directly interface with the mind.

Here is the trailer of the short movie.

Mars is a short movie set around Iran’s future manned mission to Mars.

Solar Year 2400 is a story in the future in the Solar Year 2400 according to the Iranian Solar calendar.

Here is the trailer of the movie.

The society has regular meetings in Nasr City on a monthly basis where they discuss and critique the work of their members. If you are in town then be sure to stop by their meetings.