Jena Snyder, another On Spec alumnus, posted a minority opinion following my last rant. This is not the first time she and I have disagreed; there have been sparks and brush fires over the years, and we have not always liked each other. We continue to see eye-to-elbow on some things (certain traits of the […]
Archive for writing news
19
Feb
2008
"Don’t get the idea that On Spec is a democracy."
Regular visitors to this site may remember that for a number of years now, I’ve been one of the fiction editors at the Canadian SF magazine On Spec. They first approached me back in 1999; I’ve served pretty much continuously since, except for a brief hiatus back in 2001 when I felt that the fear […]
15
Feb
2008
The Green Spine
So the trade paperback edition of Blindsight showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Not bad, I guess. You’ve seen it before: they truncated the teaser text on the back, but that left room for more blurbage (which, I’m pleased to note, was actually about Blindsight this time around). I’m a bit doubtful about the presence […]
08
Feb
2008
The Frogs Are Swarming in the Milk
Going over the transcript of the Locus interview I did last July. I am grateful that Locus gives its interviewees the opportunity to “clarify or expand upon” aspects of such transcripts; I had no idea that such a smart guy as myself could be so inarticulate and unfocused. During the course of the actual interview […]
25
Jan
2008
Us and Them
I’m not going to dwell on the The Big Paris-Hilton Scale moment that’s been all over the science blogs for the past day or two, since let’s face it, Venter’s new artificial genome is really just another incremental step on the path, and besides, I already mentioned that guy recently. So instead, a potpourri of […]
14
Jan
2008
A Farewell to "Gerbils"
Three bits of news today. The smallest item is that “Repeating the Past”, the short-short that appeared in Nature last December, has been recruited for David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s annual Year’s Best anthology. The medium item is that, after months of negotiation, I have reached an agreement with Fleuve Noir in France to produce […]
11
Jan
2008
Here We Go Again
Well, looky here. Blindsight is on the preliminary Nebula ballot. I don’t really know much about the mechanics of that process — how “preliminary” turns into “beta”, when “beta” turns into “final” — beyond the fact that the award seems a bit too in-house inbred for John Clute’s many people’s liking. I’m not a member […]
10
Jan
2008
Performance Art
The good folks at Starship Sofa have posted a podcast of my longish-story “The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald”, read by, er, me. You can listen to it over here if you’re curious about the sound of my voice, if you want to check out the shots I take at the “Mundane SF” movement in […]
21
Dec
2007
Benthic Baptisms
So it begins (actually continues, but let’s not let accuracy get in the way of a good cliché): the race to exploit the deep sea. A couple of choice quotes: “deep sea mining … has the potential to explode … The hotspots are ocean floor geysers known as hydrothermal vents … “…we know almost nothing […]
10
Dec
2007
A Lack of Focus
Been a while since I posted, I know. Not for lack of material. I’ve been meaning to post a few more I, Robot-type findings — more hardwired-aesthetics, this time centering around the “Golden Ratio”; more unsurprising evidence of a developmental basis for pedophilia, along with the (even-less surprising) preemptive disclaimers by the researchers that oh […]
