You may have noticed that I haven’t been around much lately. That’s about to get worse (or better, I suppose, depending on your perspective). In order to make its August release date, Tor needs the definitive publisher-ready version of Echopraxia by the end of this month. I’m expecting to get editorial feedback Any Day Now; […]
Russian Autumn Heart
Category: ink on art, riftersTurns out I have fans in Russia (I was even going to meet some of them last month, but plans fell through at the last minute). Two of them— photographer Pavel Hotulevs and model Aija (last name unknown, but that’s okay because the first name is awesome just by itself) collaborated on a Starfish shoot […]
Tick…tick…tick…
Category: biology, blindsight, sciliticsA reader going by the handle Sylvain linked me to a cool paper a few days back; it’s something I would have killed to have had back when writing Blindsight. Are you ready for this? A tick that turns its victims into vegetarians. Look to Commins et al for the peer-reviewed details; the tl;dr version […]
Questions and Carnosaurs
Category: interviews, On the Road, public interfaceSo, screw Star Trek and Pacific Rim and transparently-manipulative surveys about nuclear power. It’s been a while since I’ve gone full narcissist; so here’s the latest in an occasional series of miscellaneous backlogged bits about me. This first item is a bit stale — I linked to the first installment of Fatal Libelli’s interview with […]
The Ultimate Star Trek Reboot.
Category: ink on art, public interfaceSo it turns out that the University of Toronto is launching something called the Toronto Science Festival — a “three-day, public celebration of science–with keynote speakers, panel discussions, as well as a variety of performances, activities, film screenings, exhibitions and events” at the tail-end of September. This year’s theme (for indeed, the intention is to […]
The Cygnus Solution.
Category: In praise of biocide, ink on art, UncategorizedI think Ontario Power Generation is trying to sell us on the idea of feeding nuclear waste to swans. At least, that seem to be the subtext of this ad I just got focus-tested on (click to embiggen)… Probit seemed curious as to my reaction… Then they asked some questions to assess my Tree-Hugger Quotient: […]
The Joy of Dumbness.
Category: ink on artLet’s get it out of the way right up front: this movie doesn’t have a single original rivet in its huge, skyscraper-sized, monster-nose-punching body. It is in fact a classic sort of monster in its own right, a crazy Frankensteinian chimera stitched together from the rotting corpses of so many other creatures you’d be hard-pressed […]
The Exact Opposite of a Shit Sandwich.
Category: On the Road, public interfaceWhat the hell is wrong with this place? I leave town for one measly week and by the time I come back some bozo left the tub running and half the city’s underwater. Waiting for a taxi I couldn’t even get online to pass my galleys off to MIT: the airport servers flooded sometime during […]
Helsinki: Day One
Category: On the Road, public interfaceThe rear hatch of our Finnair Boeing 757 wouldn’t close. Turned out there was a bottle of gin wedged into the mechanism. Our flight was delayed for an hour as they taxied us across Pearson to a special chop shop for airplanes and brought in the Jaws of Life (they could have just smashed the […]
The Final Fiblet.
Category: fibletFor a while, anyway. I handed Echopraxia in to my editor this week. It is out of my hands now; even were I seized by sudden insecurity and tried to race down to New York to snatch it physically from her hands, I wouldn’t get past the border. Now I must do other things (including […]