No blogging today, nothing’s getting between me and the new Taltos1 book.
I’ve known Steve for quite few years now, but I’ve known Vlad since I was 10 years old–we go waaaay back. And unlike many people I knew when I was ten, I’m always glad to see him when he comes around.
If that made you [...]
I read a lot of science fiction. I have, since I was a kid–the first novel with no pictures I ever read was A Wrinkle In Time. The first “adult” book I ever read was Foundation.
When I was younger I had the opportunity to read a lot of the early short work in the [...]
Whatever » From the “People This Lacking in Self-Awareness Really Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Speak in Public Ever Again” Files
But, you know what, there’s “graduate from good schools and work hard in public service” elite, and then there’s “make millions in corporate America and marry into the family that owned the mortgage on Europe” elite. [...]
I was delighted to find out this week that Emma Bull is writing a sequel to Territory (you might recall I was pretty excited about that one), tentatively titled Claim.
Of course, in the interim, I can always get a hit of Shadow Unit. (I think I might have mentioned that once or twice, possibly.)
I have [...]
Hal Duncan speaking about the Stone of Scone:
Personally, I think it should be ground up into dust and every single Scot given a piece of it as a sort of democratic fuck-you to mediaeval feudalism. The French had the right idea when it comes to inbred, porphyria-ridden, overblown celebrities. If you want tradition then bring [...]
You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment:
I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science [...]
I guess I just think that the best way to honor the sacrifices of our veterans, and the service of our soldiers, and sailors, and marines and airmen, is to not ask them to be killed or maimed in a war we should never have started in the first place. To end the Russian Roulette [...]
There’s a misunderstanding that the right-hand-path in spirituality, to use a short hand term, is about abasing or losing yourself or demolishing yourself. Not true at all. It’s simply about being in right relationship to the divine source of consciousness, and the Bodhisatvas who try to mitigate, and eventually end, the world’s suffering. But it’s [...]
I often use the same example Cory uses here in discussing security issues at work: 99% effective means 10,000 failures over a million instances. Which in turn means that if you’re trying to detect a 1-in-a-million event, then you will get it 9999 false positives for every real event you detect–and at that rate, you [...]
Check out PodCastle, a new podcast of readings from in the F/SF genre. They got my attention with their first reading, of Peter Beagle’s Come Lady Death. There are several more stories there now, as well.
More details on Anathem, the new Neal Stephenson. Looks to be another monster of a book. And, I’m thinking, we’re [...]
OK, I’m comfortable with the idea of pseudonyms for authors. Sure, when I was a kid and first ran into the concept (I think it was when someone told me that the Eric G. Iverson guy whose stories I liked in the digests had novels under another name) I was a little shocked, but I’m [...]
That’s Jack Vance over there. I’m a fan.
I’m enough of a fan that I wanted to sign up for the Vance Integral Edition when they were taking subscriptions. It played into my two compulsions: collecting all the good writing, and collecting fine or rare editions of the good writing. At that time I didn’t have [...]
“It has to be Guinness–dark, black and rich. It’s a scientifically proven fact, you know, that Guinness is forty-five percent fortitude.”
–Hal Duncan
Speaking of Scotsmen, let me say that as a general rule I am quite a fan of Hal Duncan’s blog–especially those gigantic blog entries where he intellectually swashbuckles his way through certain philosophical issues with verve and panache, using academic jargon like Mrs. Parker used wit.
In particular, I have been intending for a while now [...]
I was a bit too enervated to worry about blogging, or reading blogs, last night, so I woke this morning to find the entire Internet plastered with the news that Madeleine L’Engle had died. (See link list below).
I know exactly when I read my first L’Engle book: it was A Wrinkle In Time, in the [...]
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