Some of you may remember this scene at the very end of Starfish — the moment when the chrysalis splits open and Lenie Clarke Mk 2 emerges to wreak vengeance on the world: A slender, translucent tentacle wraps softly around her wrist. It fades away into a distance utterly black to most, slate gray to […]
This is the Way the Year Begins
Category: rant, scilitics…Not with a Bang but with a Rant. Christmastime in the Watts household has always been a time for impotent fury. It is a time to reconnect with old friends seen only during this special season, career biologists who stuck it out and stayed the course and got good steady jobs at universities and federal […]
Squiddance ’08: Big Green, Big Screen
Category: miscJust for the next little while I’m commandeering the ‘crawl for social event planning, since not everyone is on facebook and I don’t have the time to set up an actual forum. I assure you this will not become a habit. Local real estate values will be restored shortly. In the meantime, though, this is […]
Crisis? What Crisis?
Category: writing newsSorry for the extended silence. Sorry also for the preponderance of personal over sciencey news lately, despite the many and varied worldchanging links you’ve been sending to get me back on the track (this recent study, for instance, which details a case of blindsight so extreme even I had to read it twice. Which is […]
A Cornucopia of Covers; a Call-out for Cash
Category: blindsight, writing newsFirst up we have Alejandro Terán’s Alienesque cover for the Spanish edition of Blindsight, coming out, oh, I don’t know, probably next year sometime. Next we have Franz Vohwinkel’s cover for the German mass-market edition of βehemoth (thanks to “Useless Surfer” for pointing it out), which is evidently being called “Waves” over in Deutschland. And […]
High-Concept Low-Brow
Category: blindsight, ink on artIt’s credibility of a sort, I guess. The Sydney Morning Herald has just published a John Birmingham piece which jumps off from the teenybopper suckfest “Twilight” to dip its toes in the whole pop-culture vampire mystique. And what should appear, mixed in with all the Buffy and True Blood callouts, but a whole paragraph devoted […]
Brechtian Punk Cabaret: or, I Would Kill For Amanda Palmer
Category: ink on art, miscOf course she had me before she even appeared on stage, before we froze our asses off in the wind and freezing rain waiting for the doors to open, before I ever heard “Astronaut”. She had me months before she dedicated “Oasis” (the peppiest date-rape-and-abortion song evar) to Sarah Palin. She probably owned me from […]
Welcome to Pedo Central
Category: miscAt least, that is evidently the opinion of the net nanny at the Marriott Residence Inn, Woodlands, TX— which, Madeline tells me, blocks access to the ‘crawl because it is “harmful to children”. Certainly we appear to get under the skin of some folks, judging by the bleats of outrage that pop up in the […]
Perdido Shell Station
Category: deep seaFrom the outline for Intelligent Design, a near-future Crichtonesque (except, you know, well-written) novel currently languishing on my back burner: Nate Hochachka arrives on Baffin Island under complete news blackout. He has no idea why CSIS wants him here: he’s freshly-minted faculty at the University of British Columbia, still paying off his student loans and […]
Homework
Category: ink on art, public interface, sciliticsThank you all, for your thoughts on the best Hollywood faces to graft onto my characters. There are some great suggestions there; some head-slappingly perfect, some popular but utterly mysterious (Ellen Page as Lenie? What am I missing?), and some of limited utility but nonetheless entertaining. I will steal shamelessly from you all. But in […]