This Day in Blogging History: Shambling Guide to New York City; Swedish poet votes Pirate Party; Red Mars is AMAZING

One year ago today

Shambling Guide to New York City: The Shambling Guide to New York City is the first volume in a new series of books about Zoe Norris, a book editor who stumbles into a job editing a line of travel guides for monsters, demons, golem-makers, sprites, death-gods and other supernatural members of the coterie, a hidden-in-plain-sight secret society of the supernatural.

Five years ago today

Famous Swedish poet explains why he's voting for the Pirate Party: Swedish poet, novelist and scholar Lars Gustafsson blogged his reasons for voting for the Pirate Party in the next Swedish election to the European Parliament.

Ten years ago today

Red Mars: a very belated appreciation: Because now I've finally read Red Mars, and I am agog at what may be the finest sf novel I've ever read. Red Mars has all the hard-sf window-dressing that many of us imagine when we think of sf: great and accessible tours through speculative cog sci, geology, astronomy, rocketry, physics, biology, genetics, and so on, until the head swims with the sheer scope of the research task Robinson set himself in this book.

But the hard science is just the skin, and the meat of this book — as with Pacific Edge — is the "soft" science: the complex play of the community of his vast cast of characters as they set out to advance their competing agendas, writing the future of Mars.