Archive for writing news

No, not the pigment around the nipples. The award.

So barring the possibility of some cruel hoax, Blindsight is now on the final ballot for the Auroras. They haven’t posted it officially yet, but my buddy Karl‘s just announced that he’s on the same ballot for Sun of Suns, so I guess I’m not breaking any embargoes. For the nonCanadian among you (and probably […]

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The End of the Rainbow

Rainbows End took home the Hugo, coming from behind to unseat Novik’s Dragon opus in the fourth round. Congratulations to Vernor Vinge; the first story I ever read by the man was “Bookworm, Run!”, back in the mid seventies — it actually first ran in 1966, from Analog — and after forty years in the […]

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You Take What You Can Get

Snagged from some online promotional pdf from Tor; looks like the trade paper is officially set for March ’08. The lurid red border seems to be absent this time around, and the title font actually looks quite cool; one can only hope they gave it a different colour than the split-pea soup tint of the […]

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XFire PrePostMortem

I’m just decompressing after one hellaciously frenetic hour answering questions, along with Mssrs. Vinge and Stross, on XFire. The way it worked was, attendees asked questions in one chatroom; XFire staff selected some to paste in a separate room; we authors selected the ones we wanted to answer from that room, and posted said answers […]

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This. Is. The. Real. Peter. Watts. Speaking. This. Is. Not. An. Android. Imposter. No. Way.

Okay, the comments were touching enough, but I’m starting to get emails now. Even a phone message. Time to put these ugly rumours to rest. First of all, I didn’t know you cared. I am touched. Second of all, I am still alive and reasonably healthy. There have just been a number of deadlines keeping […]

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We’re Number Three! We’re Number Three!

…”We”, of course, being Jo Walton and myself, who (as you all must know by now even though I’m only getting around to posting it now) tied for third on the Campbells. We came in just behind Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder in second place, while the lot of us lost to Ben Bova’s Titan, the […]

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ReaderCon Report

Okay, Catch-Up Post #1: Ode to the Domestic Shorthair Cat. Just kidding. Readercon, the Good: met cool people. David Edelman, author of Infoquake , and shared commiseratory we-didn’t-win-the-Campbell beers. Jenny Rappaport, agent to a friend of mine who started out merely as a talented wannabe in search of advice — and whom I should have […]

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Going South

Scant posts for the next little while: I’m heading off to Readercon, just outside Boston, at the crack of dawn tomorrow. I may even see some of you down there, assuming I don’t end up the token white guy in the little room at the border because some slack-jawed imbecile at Customs doesn’t like the […]

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Banana Does Not Look Like This

Banana‘s a brown tabby with gloriously misshapen ears. This actually looks more like my first-ever cat, The Cate. (Except for the nose. The Cate had 63 dots on an otherwise flawlessly-pink nose.) But there are many good things about the illustrations for this Nature interview. For one thing, Banana makes two appearances, the second in […]

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Nature Nurtures.

The Nature interview went pretty well, after a start-up technical glitch or two. I had a blast. The ideas were thick upon the ground. (I especially liked Ken MacLeod’s premise of military robots developing self-awareness on the battlefield due to programming that gave them increasingly-complex theories-of-mind as a means of anticipating enemy behaviour.) I got […]

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