SF
drorzel | November 16, 2009Blogging has been light of late because I was in the Houston area for the weekend, at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (think Phi Beta Kappa, but for science nerds). Every chapter is required to send a representative to the annual meeting at least once every three years, and as I'm the current president of the Union chapter, I got to go this year.
In a lot of ways, the meeting was more Boskone than DAMOP, and I'm not just saying that because there were little ribbons for everybody's badges. This is an obvious consequence of the fact that it was mostly a…
drorzel | November 7, 2009We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.
In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the…
drorzel | October 30, 2009No, this is not a reference to the National Academy of Sciences report from a few years ago. This has to do with the newest Wheel of Time book, because while I'm a long distance removed from my Usenet days, some habits die hard.
If you haven't read the previous eleven books, none of what follows will make any sense. If you haven't read the latest volume, don't click below the fold unless you want everything spoiled for you.
So, how does Brandon Sanderson do at filling Robert Jordan's shoes?
The short answer is: Pretty darn good. He doesn't exactly match the style of the earlier books, but he…
drorzel | October 27, 2009There's a new release today that everyone's talking about. A perfect topic for a poll:
New Jordan book by Sanderson! Your reaction?(survey)
Your opinion is important to us, so please choose carefully.
You think I'm kidding about the ruptured disc thing? Look at the size of this thing:
Today's depressing thought: The Eye of the World is copyright 1990. Which means I've been reading this series for longer than some of my students have been alive.
Sadly, I'm not able to do the full-on "party like it's 1995" thing-- I think the college would frown on my sleeping in and skipping class because I…
drorzel | October 26, 2009I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I'm going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes:
Here's a…
drorzel | October 16, 2009I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard-- I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up.
Anyway, I've been watching, and I have to say, I'm really not blown away at this point.…
drorzel | October 11, 2009Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ notes a fairly useless interview with Guy Consolmagno, and suggests some alternative questions:
1. How old do you estimate the universe to be based not only on your observation, but also the consensus among astronomers? Would this be contrary to the biblical interpretation on the age of the universe? What about the Young Earth's interpretation of the age of the universe?
2. What is your view of the treatment received by Galileo by the church? {Oh c'mon, you knew that one was coming, didn't you?}
These would be better questions than what was asked in…
drorzel | October 5, 2009As you may or may not have heard, there's a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much...
Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it was fine. I'm not a huge fan of the other series in the Stargate family, but they're reliably entertaining when nothing else is on, and this will probably fall into that category. I doubt I'll be re-arranging my social calendar for this, but it was pretty good.
The show did do one thing that really…
drorzel | September 30, 2009Over at SciFi Wire, the house magazine of the Polish syphilis channel, Wil McCarthy has a piece with the eye-catching headline "Is Mysticism Overtaking Science in Sci-Fi?"
What really excites me right now--and not in a good way!--is the recent spate of superficially sci-fi movies that are not merely scientifically illiterate, not merely unscientific or antiscientific in their outlook, but that actually promote mysticism as a superior alternative to science.
Leaving aside the irony of this being sponsored by the Dumb-Ass Horror Movie Channel (not that there's anything wrong with dumb-ass…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly's breasts-- reminded me of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, a movie that figures prominently in Robert Charles Wilson's latest:
Act One was called Homology and it dealt with Darwin's youth. In this Act young Darwin meets the girl with…
drorzel | August 23, 2009Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great:
The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and not pay enough attention to the characters and stories. I think Schroeder's one of the best writers to emerge in this century, and his work seems to me to belong to this century, to be using newly discovered science and extrapolating from present technology, not just…
drorzel | August 12, 2009Tobias Buckell had some heart issues a while back, and the stress of Worldcon aggravated things a bit:
By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I'd hit a brick wall by the time I'd walked over. I had to duck out of the Hugo ceremony briefly to lay down. By the end of the night my pulse was racing a bit, so I went back to the hotel to sleep. When I woke up my pulse was even higher.
After checking it several times, I decided it was high enough that I would follow standing orders to check into an…
drorzel | August 11, 2009We are back in Niskayuna now, where SteelyKid is using her new powers of bipedal locomotion to help me burn off some of the excess calories from the weekend in Montreal. She's only been walking for a couple of weeks, but she can really move.
I'm pretty fried, even after napping for two hours earlier today (we dropped SteelyKid off at day care on the way home, so we could unpack and rest a little), and I have a few commitments that will limit my blogging time in the next few days, but I figured I ought to throw out a few things about the last day or two of Worldcon.
-- The Hugo results were…
drorzel | August 10, 2009Tor Books founder and publisher Tom Doherty is one of the several Guests of Honor Who Aren't Neil Gaiman at this year's worldcon, and as such there was a panel titled "Locus interviews Tom Doherty." Which might better have been titled "Tom Doherty Tells Cool Stories About His Career in Publishing, with Occasional Prompting from Gary Wolfe and Liza Groen Trombi. That might've drawn more than the twenty-ish people who turned up, which would've been nice, because he has some cool stories to tell.
I won't attempt to reproduce them in detail-- the best involved a distributor in Philly literally…
drorzel | August 9, 2009The "Philosophy of Science" panel I moderated was surprisingly well-attended, and got some decent discussion going. Kate took notes, at least for a while, and I'll post a link if she writes it up on LiveJournal.
The "Knights who Say Fuck" panel was in a very remote room that was much too small to contain a panel with Guy Gavriel Kay, David Anthony Durham, and Patrick Rothfuss on it. Well, ok, it contained them just fine, but there wasn't really room for the hundred-odd people who showed up to see them.
I was one of about a dozen people who went to thie "Cross-Genre Hard SF" panel, probably…
drorzel | August 8, 2009My talk was Friday morning at 10am, on the title given above. This wasn't my choice-- when I volunteered to be on programming, I said some general areas that I'd be willing to talk about, and left it at that. Somebody else made up the title and description for the talk, which made it very slightly like PowerPoint Karaoke. Happily, this is a topic I can easily discourse about, but I think in the future I'll try to remember to suggest more specific talk titles...
I've posted the slides for the talk on SlideShare, and will attempt embedding them below:
Worldcon09
View more presentations from…
drorzel | August 4, 2009The Worldcon program has been posted, but only as a giant, confusing PDF. I was getting cross-eyed trying to figure things out, so I ended up creating my own blank grid sheets, and making notes on those.
The following is a by-no-means comprehensive list of things I think look interesting enough to attend. There are only a handful of thing that I'll definitely be at (I'll mark those in bold), but I'll probably choose many of the rest from this list:
Thursday
15:30: Re-reading
Graham Sleight, Jo Walton, Kate
Nepveu, Larry Niven
There is a school of thought that re-reading
is a juvenile habit,…
drorzel | July 30, 2009There's another paper about the Fermi Paradox highlighted on the arXiv blog today. This one describes extensive numerical simulations which purport to show that no more than 1,000 spacefaring civilizations can be exploring the galaxy with non-replicating slower-than-light robotic probes.
Of course, this is highly contingent on a bunch of assumptions about the behavior of these imagined aliens. Enough so that the numbers seem to be pulled out of the air-- why would you assume that robotic probes last 50 million years? What makes that a reasonable figure?
It's clear that the authors have put a…
drorzel | July 26, 2009As previously noted, I will be on programming at the upcoming Worldcon in Montreal, including moderating a panel at 10am Saturday with the following title and description:
The Philosophy of Science
To what extent does SF explore the meaning of science for scientists and create the ideas that our culture has of science?
Panelists: Greer Gilman, James Morrow, Jeff Warner, Richard Crownover, and DD Barant
This is a little outside my normal range, so this post is a combination of thinking-out-loud and asking-for help as I try to figure out what sort of discussion ought to go with that panel…
drorzel | July 22, 2009Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it's time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it's mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides.
It's worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution to the problem: the Hugo Awards are voted on by fans. This means that they tend to skew to the middlebrow, true, but it also means that they can be fixed, in a way that, say, the Oscars really can't.
If you don't like the stuff that gets nominated for the Hugos, buy…