I don’t have any pictures of my father. I just realized that now, two days after he died sitting on a toilet in frigid fucking Edmonton, 2700 km from home. He was visiting my brother. He was supposed to be back by December 21st, we were going to go out for dinner before Christmas. But […]
Going to Extremes
Category: writing newsOkay, I can come up long enough for this. Pimping and tub-thumping never takes more than a few minutes. You know that new Eriophora story I’ve been fibletting recently? I’m now free to announce that it’ll be making its appearance later this year in an anthology entitled Extreme Planets: A Science Fiction Anthology of Alien […]
Me or the Manuscripts
Category: Dumbspeech, writing news2012 ended pretty well: pursuant to last month’s little squee about Blindsight placing in the Top Ten of the Past Twelve poll over at Locus, turns out that I also showed up on the comparable lists for Best 21st Century Short Story (“The Things”, at #4), and barely squeaked into the top ten for Best […]
Turducken
Category: fibletWe’re going to hit. We’re aiming to hit, we’re going to let the lesser monster devour us before the greater one devours it in turn. We’ll lower Eriophora by her own bootstraps, sink through roiling bands of hydrogen and helium and a thousand exotic hydrocarbons, down to whatever residual deep-space chill Thule’s been hoarding since […]
The Locus of Our Discontent.
Category: writing newsHuh. Will you look at that. Turns out Locus did a reader’s survey of the best SF and Fantasy novels of the 20th and 21st Centuries (discussion ongoing over at Tor.com). Let us gloss over the fact that the 21st Century isn’t quite done yet, which kind of weakens the relative weight of that list’s […]
And So Another Build Begins.
Category: fibletSo many eons, slept away while the universe wound down around him. He’s dead to human eyes. Even the machines barely glimpse the chemistry ticking over in those cells: an ancient molecule of hydrogen sulphide, older than suns, frozen in its hemoglobin embrace; an electron shuttled sluggishly down some metabolic pathway two weeks ago. Back […]
Deep Convictions, Shallow Roots.
Category: sentience/cognition(Being an English edit of a column that appeared in Nowa Fantaskyka a few months back) You’ll remember that I recently returned from a trip to Sweden. While I was there, by a curious coincidence, I happened to read a Swedish study from the Public Library of Science: “Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness […]
Overthinking Apocalypse
Category: biotech, fibletThere was more, of course. Prof. Piotr Dembowski of the University of Maryland, talking about how difficult it had been to crack the GRM. Someone else from Simon Fraser, reporting that something like Firebrand (“it’s always hard to tell when dealing with encrypted genes”) was showing up in some microbe — Bacteroides thetasomethingorother — that […]
It’s a Twin Peaks Christmas, Charlie Brown!
Category: miscI was never much of a family person during my first five decades; anyone familiar with the family of my childhood will understand why I spent a half-century running in horror from the prospect of having to deal with another one of the fucking things. As a result, I’m a bit of a virgin when […]
The Deal with Dumbspeech.
Category: Dumbspeech, writing newsAs some of you may recall, back on May 10, 2010 I clambered onto the ‘crawl to announce the signing of a contract for the sidequel to Blindsight. As of Nov 2 2011, I announced that I’d handed in the manuscript. In between (and occasionally afterward), I dropped what occasional fiblets I could without giving […]