SF
drorzel | March 1, 2008The Science Fiction class for which I agreed to guest lecture is an 8am class, which is earlier than I like to be up and about. Knowing this, I went to bed early on Thursday night. Of course, being a bookaholic of long standing, I needed something to read to put me to sleep. Genius that I am, I grabbed the ARC of Cory Doctorow's upcoming YA novel Little Brother...
So, I hadn't really had enough sleep when I got to campus for the class on Friday. Still, adrenaline can make up for a lot...
I was introduced as "Not only a physics professor, but also a world famous blogger," though I suggested…
drorzel | February 28, 2008Yesterday's cheery hypothetical came about because I've agreed to do a guest lecture in a Science Fiction class in the English department. I'm going to be talking about Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," whose connection to the hypothetical should be obvious to people who have read it, but is a spoiler for those who haven't.
My guest spot will be this Friday, and I sat in on a class last week (where they discussed a Zelazny story and one of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) to get an idea of what the class is usually like. This will be a different experience for me. It's been fifteen years…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Say you were offered the chance to be introduced to the great love of your life, your absolute perfect soul mate. The two of you will be perfect together-- compatible personalities, the same taste in movies and books, sex so good you'll temporarily lose the power of speech-- but you'll only be together for five years. At the end of five years, your partner will die, absolutely and inevitably-- you'll be told the time, place, and manner of their death, and nothing you do can stop it.
This person is perfect for you, but there is absolutely no way you will ever meet by chance. The only chance…
drorzel | February 23, 2008Because I'm a Bad Person:
(Context here, here, and here, Flickr group here.)
drorzel | February 22, 2008A reader writes in with a literary query:
I was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined. Naturally, Stephenson's Diamond Age and Crichton's Prey come to mind. You know of other examples that would make for meaty discussion by a bunch of engineers? [...] I want to stress that most of the course will focus on technical content, so whatever work we pick has to have *some* basis…
drorzel | February 22, 2008The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I've been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I've covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I've been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I'd at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year.
Recently read books:
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would've liked this…
drorzel | February 18, 2008Since basically nobody reads my inside-baseball stuff about SF, I'll put the details below the fold. Short version: Kate and I went to Boskone this past weekend, and it was good.
Various miscellany:
-- During the week, Kate came down with the cold that I had last weekend. As late as Thursday night, she was thinking of not even going, but I convinced her that moping at home would be more depressing than making the trip. She spent most of the con in her room, though.
-- This was the second year of Boskone in the Westin Waterfront, which isn't as good a space as the Sheraton at Prudential Center…
drorzel | February 18, 2008I gave a talk at Boskone in the prime Sunday 10 am slot, on quantum teleportation. I read the opening dialogue from Chapter 8 of the book, and then did a half-hour (or so) explanation of the real physics behind quantum teleportation.
If you weren't one of the thirty-ish people who watched at least part of the presentation, you don't know what you missed. But you can get a little flavor of it by looking at the PDF version of my PowerPoint slides (1.1 MB). I think they're mostly comprehensible on their own, but even if they're not, there are cute dog pictures galore. So, you know, there's that…
drorzel | February 10, 2008Kate and I will be attending Boskone agains next week, and the preliminary program has been posted. Kate's posted her thoughts on what looks interesting, and mine are below the fold:
Friday 7pm Otis: The Rise of Modern Science
What happened in the Middle Ages which led to the rise of modern science? Why did it happen first in Europe and not elsewhere? How did science grow if the Middle Ages were really an "age of faith" without reason?
Guy Consolmagno, John Farrell, Michael F. Flynn
Could be interesting, if we're there. We may be visiting family that evening.
Friday 8pm Consuite: Death to…
drorzel | February 5, 2008It's Hugo nomination season again, which means that I need to come up with a list of works to suggest for SF's premier fan-voted award. It also means that there are lots of publications out there putting out lists of recommended works to help potential Hugo voters narrow their ballots.
Last year, there was a bit of a fuss kicked up because the list of nominees was almost all white males. Looking at my potential list of nominees (more detail below the fold), I would say at least my ballot is headed in that direction again. If you are a person who would like to see more books and stories by…
drorzel | February 4, 2008I'll be on programming at Boskone again this year, and got my preliminary schedule over the weekend:
Satur 10am Tunguska at 100
Guy Consolmagno, Jeff Hecht, Chad Orzel
On June 30, 1908, an exploding asteroid leveled 2000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, producing a fireball from the sky which knocked pine trees over like matchsticks near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Russia. Such an explosion today over more populated areas could lay waste an entire city. What was it? (Do we know, yet?) What are some of the older theories, and why were they discredited? How likely…
drorzel | January 18, 2008Amazon conveniently informed me today of a very positive development in SF: Night Shade Books is republishing Glen Cook's space opera novel The Dragon Never Sleeps, which I reviewed quite some time ago. I've re-read it since then, and if anything, my opinion of it improved. It's "New Space Opera" written years before there was such a thing.
You can pre-order it from Amazon or get it direct from the publisher, but if you like Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Neal Asher, and that sort of crowd, you should buy this at once. It's terrific.
drorzel | January 14, 2008Well, OK, not really. You can, however, hear what I sound like by listening to a couple of official Tor podcasts made from the panel I did at Worldcon with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Adam Rakunas, Paul Cornell and Yoshio Kobayashi.
The panel was back in September, but I haven't seen the files on Tor's web page until just now. You can access them directly, if they move off the index page, using these links:
Part 1/2
Part 2/2
It's a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and a couple of funny things get said. The sound quality is pretty good, especially given that it was recorded by a single Tor staffer…
drorzel | January 10, 2008Kate and I got our Hugo nomination ballots in the mail yesterday (as members of the 2007 Worldcon, we get the right to nominate works for the 2008 Hugo Awards). The nomination deadline isn't until March 1st, but this still seems like a good time to ask:
What should I be nominating for the 2008 Hugo Awards?
I usually use the Locus Recommended Reading issue as a template to remind myself what's eligible, but that won't be out for a while, and I've got this blog just sitting here, begging to be used. So, leave your suggestions in the comments.
Given last year's kerfuffle over the lack of female…
drorzel | January 10, 2008As I mentioned a few days ago, a colleague asked me if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture for a class on science fiction. She suggested that a good way to go might be to pick one story to have the class read, and talk about that.
Kicking ideas around with Kate, I latched onto the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life," from the Starlight 2 anthology (and also his collection Stories of Your Life and Others), because it's got a lot of great stuff in it-- linguistics, physics, math, really alien aliens, and fantastic human characters and interactions. If you haven't read it, it's a great…
drorzel | January 9, 2008Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science!
(This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show, but it's pretty amusing. Make sure to at least skim through the comments.)
drorzel | January 7, 2008I unwisely agreed to cover the first class for one of my colleagues with a late-arriving flight back from break before finding out when the class met, which was 8:00 this morning. As a result, my whole morning blog routine was disrupted.
I'm saved from having the site go completely dark, though, by an email from a colleague who's teaching a course on science fiction, asking if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture. I'm open to the idea, but I don't know what I would talk about. So, here are two Dorky Poll questions, one very specific:
1) If I were to do one guest lecture for a class on…
drorzel | December 10, 2007"Do you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -- Steven Brust, Dzur
Way, way back in October, when I was annoying you all with DonorsChoose fundraining posts, I offered to sell post topics for $30. I've paid off most of these, but I have three left, one of which was for something more regarding Robert Jordan.
As I noted at the time, the Wheel of Time books were ridiculously important in my life-- because of them, I got involved with the Robert Jordan group on Usenet (I take obscure pride in being there from before the founding of rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan), and through…
drorzel | December 9, 2007Kate and I went to see The Golden Compass last night because, dude, armored bears! Also, we both really enjoyed the book, back when it first came out (though I haven't re-read it since The Amber Spyglass, to see if it was retroactively ruined by the third volume).
From the opening titles in the left-over Lord ot ht Rings font, it's clear that this is New Line's bid to reassert their dominance over the "movie adaptations of popular fantasy books" genre, and as a spectacle, it's very good. There's a nifty steampunk aesthetic to Lyra's world and, dude, armored bears!
I didn't walk out of the…
drorzel | December 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal land, Sherwood Smith links approvingly to an essay by Tom Simon in response to what are apparently some "logical positivist" evles in Christopher Paolini's books. I haven't read the books in question, but it really doesn't matter, as Simon very quickly spins this off into a larger essay about the nature of the world, in the mode of C.S. Lewis:
In my life, I have never witnessed an instance where the laws that govern the world sufficed to explain an event. That is, I have never seen anything that was not, strictly speaking, the after-effect of a miracle. Many events have…