An overseas pixel-pal sent me a link to a Daily Mail (UK) piece on the Davos Forum a few days back. I think he expected me to be tickled by the second half of the headline: Harvard professors warn ‘privacy is dead’ and predict mosquito-sized robots that steal samples of your DNA —but predictably, it […]
Author Archive
24
Jan
2015
Somebody Get This Guy a Budget
We open on two civilians waiting to board a train. To their left stands a SWAT cop in riot gear; to their right, a battered drone right out of Blade Runner hovers menacingly at heart level. Glances are exchanged, though no words are spoken: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. […]
21
Jan
2015
What’s Wrong With This Picture.
A snapshot of the past work week: Research, 5.6 hours. Interviews & columns, 1.4 hours. Blog and website, 3.8h (update: 4.5). Critiquing, 4 hours. Writing (nonfiction— I’ll tell you about it if it doesn’t get rejected), 18.7h. Writing (fiction), 0 hours. Office work, mainly emails: 12.6 hours. That’s a pretty-typical 46-hour work week, not counting […]
15
Jan
2015
Desperately Seeking Citation.
Can anyone point me to an anecdote about an introvert who manifested a sudden extrovertian personality change (cracking jokes, hitting on the nurses) when one of his cerebral hemispheres was anesthetized prior to brain surgery? I’m almost certain it hails from one of Ramachandran’s books, but I can’t find the damn thing and it’s relevant […]
02
Jan
2015
Rollover
So, here we are again. Another year. The last one went decently enough, writing-wise at least. “The Colonel” got picked up for reprint both in Dozois’ Best SF 32 and in Allan Kaster’s Top Ten Tales of SF 7. “Collateral” made the ninth iteration of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the […]
23
Dec
2014
Jewels and Cataracts: the Echopraxia Postmortem
Why yes, since you ask; I expect there will be a concluding volume to the Consciousnundrum series. I know how it begins: father and son (what’s left of them) finally reunite, decades after the fall of Icarus hit the world’s reset button. I know how it ends too, although I don’t want to spoil it […]
12
Dec
2014
Squids With Tasers.
A simple experiment, a famous fish. Electric eels, shocking their prey. Nothing to see here, right? “The mechanism of the eel’s attack is unknown”, Kenneth Catania states right off the top in his new paper in Science, and I admit I shrugged and thought What’s to know? What’s so mysterious about electrocution? But it turns […]
02
Dec
2014
Interstellar and my Inner Anti-Abortionist.
Let’s start this review by warning you all that major spoilers follow. Then let’s talk about abortion. If I squint really hard, I can sort of see how someone possessed of a belief in an immortal soul— and further, that it slides down the chute the moment some lucky sperm achieves penetration— might hold an […]
24
Nov
2014
David and the Goliaths.
Perhaps the saddest, most telling indictment of our current political administration is that even after the drone strikes, the executive murders, the ongoing suppression of torture reports, the all-engulfing phagocytosis of the surveillance state— basically, a Human Rights record so abysmal that even Dubya might flush with shame— we Canadians can still look south of […]
13
Nov
2014
Shapeshifter.
My most recently published story, a bit of neouromil that appears in Neil Clarke’s cyborg anthology Upgraded, contains the following passage: Monahan had inventoried Sabrie’s weak spots as if he’d been pulling the legs off a spider. … Not into performance rage, doesn’t waste any capital getting bent out of shape over random acts of […]
