A Motley Mosaic of Miscellaneous Minutiae

Sorry for the recent radio silence; been a lot going on lately, events to plan, agents to approach, interviewers to charm (not easy when you're me), awards to lose (somewhat easier). Also, I was hoping to get back to some cool science postings, since a lot of cutting-edge stuff has been coming down the pike and I don't want the crawl to revert to all-me-all-the-time mode. But that would have involved having time to actually read about the research, and time has been short these past few days.

So today, despite my best intentions, it's a diffuse cloud of unrelated particles centering on me me me. I'll try not to let it happen too often.

First up: I have passed the giddy peak of being a multi-award finalist and begun the long ignoble slide into multi-award loser. The Locus went to Vinge's Rainbows End, which I really should read one of these days. Not entirely unexpected; one does not (one should not) easily topple someone of Prof. Vinge's stature. (I just hope he chokes in all the other awards I'm about to get an ass-kicking in...)

For those interested in catching sight of me in the wild, it looks like I'm going to be Guest of Honour at Pure Speculation, this upcoming October 13-14. It's in Edmonton. It's in the Masonic Hall in Edmonton. This could be really interesting. Also, as usual, I'll be your regular garden-variety writer at Readercon this July 5-8 (just outside Boston), where they're trying to talk me into giving a Blindsight-related talk (I'm considering it) and an autograph session (not bloody likely: I gave a reading last year and a leprous woodworker could have counted the attendees on the remaining fingers of one hand).

Here's something cool: I'm getting interviewed tomorrow by Nature, in a kind of teleconferenced roundtable with fellow bioskiffs Paul McAuley, Ken MacLeod, and Joan Slonczewski. We're going to be talking about everything from the sublime (H.G. Wells) to the ridiculous (Michael Crichton), and it's going to end up both in their print journal and on their website (plans to also release the event as a podcast may be aborted depending on Skype's sound quality that day). In slightly staler news, I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal's online edition a week or so ago, in relation to the whole Creative Commons thing. (I gotta say, publicity wise, that CC decision of mine was at least the luckiest move I ever made, if not necessarily the smartest). I don't know if that story will ever run, but the guy who interviewed me seemed hopeful at the time.

Oh, and this Marc Andreessen guy who included me amongst the top ten sf writers of the decade? I don't often mention personal blog entries here — it makes the frequency of my own insecure egosurfing all too apparent — but evidently this dude co-invented Mosaic and cofounded Netscape. This guy is huge in the real world. The fact that he puts me in the same league with guys like Stross, Asher, Reynolds, Scalzi et al — on the basis of a single book, no less — shit, that almost makes up for Marvin Minsky calling Blindsight "stupid" (Update: Marvin Minsky did not call Blindsight stupid after all! It was all just a cruel hoax!)(Meta-update: okay, not a hoax, then. A misunderstanding. But hoax still sounds better.)

Now I'm gonna go answer some of the comments you've been leaving.