Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

On my last excursion to Boston, while I sadly did not get to do the Readercon thing1, I did get to pick up a couple of more Centipede Press books that I had directed to my US mail drop (a.k.a. “Matt’s house”): a copy of the much talked about Lovecraft art book, which I scored [...]

The KGB Raffle winners are up.
It appears I have won a wormhole.

Could this, combined with my recently acquired Mad Scientist goggles, be the beginning of my career as a supervillain?
Or, alternately, the beginning of a mildly comic adventure through time and space?

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 [...]

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 [...]

That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“.
And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to [...]

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 [...]

..and here, ladies and gentlemen, you see the sky over Sayre’s “lightning farm” as Orannis the Destroyer is freed from his bindings.
OK, maybe not, although that’s pretty much exactly how I pictured that in my head.
What you’re actually looking at there is the sky over the Chaiten Volcano in Chile. No photoshoppery, the image is [...]

Sigh. I finally got around to reading the Edge of Reason last night.
Despite the fact that lots of people on the Internets seem to think this was the wonderful book I was expecting, it just didn’t work for me. The plot was kind of interesting, but the rest of the craft just wasn’t there.
The [...]

As I write this I am watching the Australian movies made from Shane Maloney’s books about Murray Whelan. You may remember that those books were some of the big successes from my first Australian trip, and that I even mentioned the movies when I wrote that stuff up. Well, my usual online sources didn’t make [...]

I love “give us an obscure favourite” pieces. From this recent one at the Village Voice I can see myself looking for Harold Q. Masur, Dorothy Dunbar, and Don Carpenter. The only guys there I was already familiar with are Harry Stephen Keeler (much touted by a certain popular genre author), Amis (who I am [...]

That’s a sample page from a book I’m really enjoying reading at the moment: The Explainers by Jules Feiffer. (You can see some other sample pages at The Comics Reporter, or even cooler check out the slideshow on Flickr.)
Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules [...]

I know you’re already seen this, but it’s just too good to let go by.

My favourite bit references the hobo signs stuff we were looking at earlier this month:
And they devised a secret language of signs and scrawls used to alert their passing brethren to danger or opportunity. A crucifix chalked on the side of [...]

So, Jeff VanderMeer, author of many things (including frightfully good stories about mushroom people) linked to my post below about pseudonyms.
He’s gone with the “rather laugh than cry” route and has introduced a new Internet meme for book nerds:
So, what’s your literary pen name? THIS IS THE OFFICIAL FORMULA (as created by, um, me):
(1) Use [...]

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 [...]