(A lightly edited reprint of a recent Nowa Fantastyka column.) My stuff has been compared, on occasion, to the work of Stanislaw Lem. I find this intimidating. It’s kind of a high bar to clear; when expectations are calibrated to such altitudes, it’s easy to fall short. Fortunately there’s a way to distract from that […]
Black Wedding: The Re-emergence of Lenie Clarke.
Category: ink on art, misc, riftersLet’s get the trivial notes and minutes out of the way first. Echopraxia, “Collateral”, and “The Colonel” all made it onto the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2014. (Still no love for “Giants”, I see, though I continue to love it as perhaps only a father can). Echopraxia (which I’m told has gone into a […]
The Slippery Step-Function: Or, Reasons to be Cheerful.
Category: Big Brother, legalAn overseas pixel-pal sent me a link to a Daily Mail (UK) piece on the Davos Forum a few days back. I think he expected me to be tickled by the second half of the headline: Harvard professors warn ‘privacy is dead’ and predict mosquito-sized robots that steal samples of your DNA —but predictably, it […]
Somebody Get This Guy a Budget
Category: ink on artWe open on two civilians waiting to board a train. To their left stands a SWAT cop in riot gear; to their right, a battered drone right out of Blade Runner hovers menacingly at heart level. Glances are exchanged, though no words are spoken: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. […]
What’s Wrong With This Picture.
Category: miscA snapshot of the past work week: Research, 5.6 hours. Interviews & columns, 1.4 hours. Blog and website, 3.8h (update: 4.5). Critiquing, 4 hours. Writing (nonfiction— I’ll tell you about it if it doesn’t get rejected), 18.7h. Writing (fiction), 0 hours. Office work, mainly emails: 12.6 hours. That’s a pretty-typical 46-hour work week, not counting […]
Desperately Seeking Citation.
Category: misc, neuro, sentience/cognitionCan anyone point me to an anecdote about an introvert who manifested a sudden extrovertian personality change (cracking jokes, hitting on the nurses) when one of his cerebral hemispheres was anesthetized prior to brain surgery? I’m almost certain it hails from one of Ramachandran’s books, but I can’t find the damn thing and it’s relevant […]
Rollover
Category: climate, interviews, scilitics, writing newsSo, here we are again. Another year. The last one went decently enough, writing-wise at least. “The Colonel” got picked up for reprint both in Dozois’ Best SF 32 and in Allan Kaster’s Top Ten Tales of SF 7. “Collateral” made the ninth iteration of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the […]
Jewels and Cataracts: the Echopraxia Postmortem
Category: ink on artWhy yes, since you ask; I expect there will be a concluding volume to the Consciousnundrum series. I know how it begins: father and son (what’s left of them) finally reunite, decades after the fall of Icarus hit the world’s reset button. I know how it ends too, although I don’t want to spoil it […]
Squids With Tasers.
Category: biology, Intelligent Design (the novel), neuro, OmniscienceA simple experiment, a famous fish. Electric eels, shocking their prey. Nothing to see here, right? “The mechanism of the eel’s attack is unknown”, Kenneth Catania states right off the top in his new paper in Science, and I admit I shrugged and thought What’s to know? What’s so mysterious about electrocution? But it turns […]
Interstellar and my Inner Anti-Abortionist.
Category: ink on art, reviewsLet’s start this review by warning you all that major spoilers follow. Then let’s talk about abortion. If I squint really hard, I can sort of see how someone possessed of a belief in an immortal soul— and further, that it slides down the chute the moment some lucky sperm achieves penetration— might hold an […]