Fast Forward 2 is the second volume in Lou Anders' excellent science fiction anthology series, featuring knockout stories from Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell, Kay Keyon, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi and many others. I'm very proud to have a story in the book, too — a long, long novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum called True Names, which tries to imagine what the wars between light-speed-lagged, self-replicating nano-machine-based galactic civilizations would look like as different nanites warred to see who would convert the universe to computronium first. — Read the rest
Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose knockout story "The Ant King: A California Fairytale" convinced me that he was desitined to be one of the great talents in science fiction, has Creative-Commons-licensed his story "The Orange," which originally appeared was reprinted in Harper's Magazine (selling an sf story to Harper's is itself quite a coup!) — Read the rest
Benjamin Rosenbaum, the talented science fiction writer responsible for "The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale," is doing a monthly series of vignettes describing fantastic stories on StrangeHorizons, an online sf magazine. Wonderful stuff.
The Censors' Building is in an olive grove gone wild (olive oil is no longer among the principal products of Bellur), and during their afternoon break and their evening break the censors wander the groves, picking and nibbling on the bitter olives, searching for inspiration.
Dream Askew and Dream Apart are "no-dice, no masters" RPGs where players collaborate to tell stories together without dice or dungeon masters: Dream Askew uses the system to create campaigns in "a queer enclave enduring the collapse of civilization" and Dream Apart is set in "a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical-historical Eastern Europe."
Writing in Boston Magazine, Katherine Ozment recounts how she went from hovering over her kids to keep them from harm to adopting a hands-off regime that let them take risks and play on their own. I had dinner last night with my writing-collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum and he said he saw his duty as a parent as "preventing damage," not "preventing pain" — pain (emotional and physical) teaches us a lot, and parents need to allow some measure of it in their kids' lives to help them learn important lessons, but a parent also should intervene to prevent pain from giving rise to damage. — Read the rest
Clever spamfighters are allowing botnets to infect one isolated computer, then analyzing the spams it sends to figure out the template used to generate its messages. This template is then propagated to spam-filters:
"This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters," says Michael O'Reirdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a coalition of technology companies.
Hot damn! The 2009 Hugo Awards ballot is live and it's a doozy, and not just because I'm on it twice (Best Novel: Little Brother and Best Novella: True Names, with Ben Rosenbaum). No, it's better than that — the entire ballot is just killer, especially my competition in the Best Novel category (hell, three quarters of the authors were invited to my wedding, and I'd have been delighted to have the remaining one in attendance). — Read the rest
It's time again for Locus Magazine's annual public poll of the best works in science fiction for the preceding year, with the winners taking home the prestigious Locus Awards. I've been privileged to win several of these awards, and they're among the highest honors I've ever been paid. — Read the rest
Locus Magazine has published its annual roundup of the top science fiction of 2008. As with every year, this is a fabulous starting point for anyone who wants to get up to speed with what the field has on its mind these days — there's a lot of breadth and gusto in these selections. — Read the rest
A couple weeks ago, I posted to let you know that nominations for the Hugo awards had just opened — and promised to re-post once the online nomination form went live. I've just noticed that it's up — handy if you want to save the hassle of printing out the form and putting it in the mail! — Read the rest
Turbulence.org recently released "Tumbarumba," a project by Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (Ethan Ham).
Tumbarumba is an anthology in the form of a browser add-on. To read the stories, readers must stumble upon them while browsing the web. The browser add-on will occasionally insert a story fragment into a web page as it loads it.
The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened — if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:
Frank Wu sez, "Jay Lake and I have edited an anthology called "The Exquisite
Corpuscle." It's not just a random assortment of stories – it's a
literary version of the game "Telephone." An experiment in creative
groupthink. I started out doing a painting, which I handed off to Gary
Shockley (who's had a number of stories in "The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction"). — Read the rest
Benjamin Rosenbaum's magnificent, absurdist hacker story, The Ant King, is read aloud in this weeks' StarShipSofa podcast (starting around 35:00). My listening day is complete.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment.
I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe. — Read the rest
This year's Hugo nominees are out — congrats to all the great nominees! It's amazing to see great books like "Glasshouse," "Rainbows End," and "Blindsight" on the ballot, along with stories like Ian McDonald's "The Djinn's Wife," Bill Shunn's "Inclination," Geoff Ryman's "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter," Ben Rosenbaum's "The House Beyond Your Sky" not to mention Neil Gaiman's "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," Tim Pratt's "Impossible Dreams" — and the list goes on! — Read the rest
Next Sunday, May 1, I'll be participating in a group book-signing in Chicago, following on from the Nebula Awards banquet the night before. Other signers include Kevin J. Anderson,
Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, Janis Ian, Geoffrey Landis, Todd McCaffrey, Jack McDevitt, Rebecca Moesta Anderson, Mike Resnick, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Steven H Silver, Laurel Winter and W.R. — Read the rest
Fuck diamonds. Isotopes are a girl's best friend. Let others dream of ice this Valentine's Day — real men procure hunks of ultra-highly-irradiated uranium ore for their honeys. And they buy it online, for $45.00 a shot.
They deliver it with postapocalyptic bouquets of Man-in-The-Moon Marigolds, then they make sweet radioactive love in the blue-green glow of nuclear lust. — Read the rest
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment.
