SF

Kate and I will both be on programming at Anticipation, the upcoming Worldcon in Montreal. The official program should be up on the web soonish, but I got my schedule by email, and figured I would post it here for those who care: When: Fri 10:00 Title: How to Effectively Talk about Science to Non-Scientists and Why it Matters Description: Presenting one's ideas is ever more crucial for scientists. If we don't do it well, you can be certain someone else will do it badly. (This will be a slightly reconfigured version of the talk I gave at the Science21 meeting last fall.) When: Sat 10:00…
I'm something like 100 pages ahead of the Infinite Summer spoiler line (page 283 as of last night), meaning that a lot of the stuff I'd like to discuss or see discussed isn't fair game yet. I'm still greatly enjoying the re-read of Infinite Jest, though. As I've said before, this is a dangerous book for me, in that Wallace's style has a tendency to leak over into my own writing when I read too much of his stuff(*). It's also a dangerous book in that a large number of the sections are written in a headlong style with very few breaks, and thus no place to stop until you get to the end of the…
There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day. I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of…
Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's... I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second,…
The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group. I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…
Kate's Tolkien re-read has reached Rohan, and her latest re-read post includes a reference to a comment I made about Legolas's improbable visual acuity: Re: Legolas seeing the Riders: I have since been advised by the resident physicist that the size of a pupil is a limiting factor on the resolution possible--if I understood properly, basically it boils down to how much light can come in--and under the laws of physics as we know them, it is not actually physically possible for Legolas to have resolved that level of detail at 5 leagues, regardless of how good his brain is at decoding images or…
(Alternate post title: "Hey to James Nicoll") Via John Dupuis, our clever neighbors to the North has come up with a possible (partial) alternative to rockets: "For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space," says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York's Faculty of Science & Engineering, who is heading the project. A paper detailing the design was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica; it is co-authored by York space engineering Professor George Zhu and graduate student Raj Seth. "…
Over at Tor.com, they've unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate's Lord of the Rings related recommendation list. In a similar vein, something I only noticed today (via an ad on my own blog) that may have been around for a while is the Seed store, collecting all the books reviewed by the Corporate Masters over the past…
A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year's Hugo Awards. I've now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I'd comment on them as well. As a general matter, I'd just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can't generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another…
I'm eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, as a paid-up member of Anticipation. As such, I got the free packet of nominated works that they put together for the voters, and have started working my way through the short fiction (I've read all the novel nominees that I'm going to). Whether you're eligible to vote or not, you can get links to most of the nominated works here. I've only read the Short Story nominees so far, and I have to say, I would vote for "No Award" five times if it was a choice between that and "Article of Faith" winning. I really could've sworn that this vein of crap was…
The proprietor of Good Mom, Bad Mom emails to point out a post spinning off Monday's Goldilocks post. A good thing she did, as Technorati has collapsed into utter uselessness, at least for finding people who link to my posts. Her post quotes an unnamed correspondent, who writes: My two daughters are both compulsive readers, gobbling up everything in their path. As a result, they both have very large vocabularies are very well informed about a range of things. I love it--instead of watching TV and getting dumb, they're reading, and getting smart. Mostly they read novels, but it's amazing how…
...what with his wife, Emily, giving birth to twins. It sounds like he's pretty happy with this state of affairs, though. Go leave him a congratulatory comment. Or, better yet, go buy one of his books-- they're great fun for you to read, and will help keep Toby supplied with the vast number of diapers he'll need in the next several months...
I was rather surprised when Friday's quick post about Tolkien spawned a lengthy comment thread full of people arguing against the suggestion that The Lord of the Rings is affected by Tolkien's Catholic faith. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but my impression of the field is that this is simply not a controversial statement, that there is ample material in the reams of letters, early drafts, and other background material showing that this is the case. On reflection, it seems that there are two things going on here. One is that some people seem to think that a book cannot be said to contain Christian…
Arts & Letters Daily had a link to a City Journal article about religious symbolism in science fiction, which attempts to claim that there has been a recent swing toward Christian symbolism in the genre (at least, in movie and television SF-- the only books mentioned are forty-ish years old). There are a number of problems with it, but the most jarring has to be this paragraph: One reason that Disney finally made a movie out of C. S. Lewis's Christian allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005 may be that popular fantasy has become increasingly religious at heart. Peter Jackson…
The nominees for this year's Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel: Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK) Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor) Surprisingly, I've already read four of the five. This is either blind luck, or a sign that I'm better in tune with the tastes of SF fandom than ever before. I'm not sure which I'd prefer. The as-yet-…
In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They're auctioning off a lot of interesting stuff, from books to artwork to personal services. The community is Con or Bust, and information about how the thing works is also available. If you're interested in supporting this project, either by bidding or offering items for bid, head on over and check it out.
One of last year's highest-traffic posts was, weirdly, Talk Like a Physicist. I say "weirdly" because it wasn't much more than a link to Tom at Swans On Tea. It's that time of year again, and Tom's back with an updated list of vocabulary for your physicist-talking needs. I don't have much to add, but one of Tom's items: We physicists quantify relationships -- something that is complicated is "nonlinear," or even "highly nonlinear." Opposites are "inversely proportional" reminded me of a great literary reference, from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life": "So they can read a word with equal ease…
The Flamewar That Ate LiveJournal continues its livejournophagy (I've only caught the edges of it, and that alone is a carnival of suck-- if you want to know more, Jo Walton's recent post gets the feel, and contains links to more). In one of several efforts to bring something positive out of this, Kate has created a LiveJournal community: This community is meant to be a place that rounds up the anti-derailing efforts in a central location for the benefit of those who want to continue the conversations about cultural appropriation, racial diversity and multiculturalism in SFF fiction and…
A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a global warming panel at Boskone. The panel was recorded by Richard Amirault, who has now posted the video on his Boston fandom website (Episode 41, if it moves off the front page before you click that link). I haven't watched the video, but I listened to the audio while grading papers, and it's pretty good. So, if you're kicking yourself for not getting to that panel, here's your chance to see what you missed.
We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations: Best Novel Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same. Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe. Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…