So, two more sets of negotiations concluded, two more contracts signed and sent: Arabesque (a new imprint of AST Publishing) is now officially putting out a Russian edition of Blindsight, and Bibliopolis is tasked with the Spanish translation. Both have promised me input on cover layout. Ominously, the editor at Arabesque — after having seen […]
The Skiffies…
Category: biology, marine, neuroBeing the selection of a recent science item, hitherto unreported on this ‘crawl, most near and dear to my heart. Oddly, most of the items I’ve noticed recently seem reminiscent of my second book Maelstrom — from this tell-us-something-we-don’t-know piece in the NY Times about the increasing fragility of complex technological systems to Naomi Klein’s […]
Bosum Buddies
Category: writing newsThe good folks over at SF Signal have pointed me to results of a post-Hugo poll on their site, suggesting that a strong majority of their 72 respondents seem to think I was robbed. (This is especially gracious of them since they themselves didn’t like Blindsight all that much.) What’s really interesting about this poll, […]
Remedial Gigerology
Category: biology, marineOkay, I need to tell no one here how very cool it is that moray eels have a second set of accessory jaws that leap out of their throat to handle difficult prey. You all know the obvious movie reference. What I don’t know is, there are a couple of hundred species of moray eels […]
Do-It-Yourself Zombiehood
Category: biology, just putting it out there..., neuroNew to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes“. Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes.” […]
No, not the pigment around the nipples. The award.
Category: writing newsSo 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 […]
Wolbachia cronenbergium
Category: biology, evolution, scienceMy, the folks over at the Venter Institute have been busy lately. First they changed one microbe species into another by physically replacing its entire genome. They did this in their quest to create a synthetic organism, basically a chassis with the absolute minimum number of genes necessary for life, which could then be loaded […]
The End of the Rainbow
Category: fellow liars, writing newsRainbows 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 […]
WoW! Pandemic!
Category: a-life, biology, scienceToday’s post comes on the heels of a) me answering backlogged questions from XFire’s gaming community, and b) grumbles from the peanut gallery about the recent lack of shiny techy science-speak on the ‘crawl. It just so happens that today’s subject combines elements of both, and holy shit is it cool: a paper in Lancet […]
The Lost Chat: Gaming Edition
Category: public interfaceLightSol: Have you ever larped or role played any other way in your life? Got into AD&D in a big way during grad school. LightSol: Has one of your novels made into a game? Not professionally. Once, a long time ago, some fan made an online Starfish sexual-abuse role-playing game with rules like “No character […]