Packing for Frankfurt. No time for thoughtful analysis of the Mono Lake Arsenic Monster (although I did take pleasure in watching Keith Olbermann correct the NASA scientist who screwed up the name of Star Trek’s Horta episode) beyond saying: Cool, but I actually think that the discovery of anaerobic metazoans has more profound implications when […]
Cats. Bags. Nanosuits.
Category: Crytek/Crysis, writing newsSo, uh, yeah. I see they announced it this morning, so I guess the embargo’s lifted. I’ve written the official adaptation of Crytek‘s Crysis 2, which was scripted by Richard Morgan. The novelization is coming out next March from Del Rey. The bio notes accompanying that announcement are a bit, well, milder than I would […]
The Xenotext Experiment
Category: biochem, biotech, Dumbspeech, ink on artA few of you may remember a throwaway bit of ecogothic ambience near the start of State of Grace: “…pure tissue was so hard to come by these days. There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to […]
Gods, Jackboots: Coda
Category: ass-hamstersI’m holding off — for the moment — on commenting about last week’s inaugural SFContario, which had much to commend it but which also contained one big gnarly injustice that might just overshadow all those good elements. Not entirely comfortable with the fact that the concomm is stonestalling1 on even addressing that issue, for reasons which I […]
You’re All Just Lucky I Don’t Have a Kodak Carousel
Category: ink on art, On the Road, public interfaceMan, what a trip. You know any table where China Mieville sits at one elbow and Scott Westerfeld at the other is gonna give rise to some interesting dinnertime conversation. That kind of mix-and-match happened pretty much every night in Nantes: We bonded with China over a mutual love of cephalopods; with Brandon and Emily […]
Fast Forward
Category: On the Road, public interfaceThey have an entire wall of prog-rock albums here, replete with listening stations. They have a dealer’s room which puts a lot of real bookstores to shame. They have cool sculptures and a shitload of guest authors in whose shadow I pale; I have drunk and snarfed at length in the company of China Miéville, […]
Beasts with Broken Backs
Category: On the Road, public interface, writing newsThis posting consists of a wadge of a accumulated items, unceremoniously horked onto the ‘crawl with no common thematic underpinnings beyond the fact that it’s all part of the backlog. I have met the major honking deadline which resulted in all these weeks of radio silence (and I’m told I’ll even be able to talk […]
Postcard from Purgatory
Category: public interface, writing newsDear Subject_Name_Here: No, I’m not back. Yes, I’m still working my ass off. No, I still can’t talk about it. Yes, when I can talk about it you will doubtless be disappointed, because it’ll be pretty anticlimatic (in the dramatic sense, not the global-warming-denier sense). But I’m going to come up and gulp a breath […]
A Breath of (Extrasolar) Air
Category: astronomy/cosmology, scienceYeah, I know, I’m supposed to be face-down in work. And I am, I am. But this is just too cool to let pass without pointing it out: a team out of Santa Cruz and Carnegie have tagged a potentially habitable planet around Gliese 581. And they did it with a good old-fashioned ground-based telescope. […]
Worth the Price
Category: On the Road, public interfaceIf wifi were water, this place would be Arrakis. Free bandwidth is an alien concept in Australia. A minute of internet is treasured more than the rarest jewel (or at least, it costs as much). Notwithstanding which, this country rocks. I could go on about the fact that the neurotoxins that developed in this place […]