In First Contact, Book 1 of David Marusek's (previously) science fiction series Upon This Rock, an alien being crash lands in a remote corner of Alaska, not far from a family-cult of preppers for the end times, and the alien exploits the beliefs of the family patriarch by posing as an angel sent to earth to initiate the final conflict. — Read the rest

The wonderful science fiction writer David Marusek sez,

To promote my launch I am giving away two free Kindle ebooks containing several of my previously published short stories. Locked behind pay walls, these stories have been somewhat difficult to obtain (outside of pirate sites).

David Marusek's Mind Over Ship is the long-awaited sequel to his groundbreaking 2005 debut novel Counting Heads, and it was worth the wait.

Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model-ee's consent) and a thousand other fragments. — Read the rest

Mark and I have rounded up some of our favorite items from our 2009 Boing Boing reviews for the second-annual Boing Boing gift guide. We'll do one a day for the next six days, covering media (music/games/DVDs), gadgets and stuff, kids' books, novels, nonfiction, and comics/graphic novels/art books. — Read the rest

David Marusek is one of the best-kept secrets of science fiction, a wild talent with a Gibson-grade imagination and marvelous prose, and a keen sense of human drama that makes it all go. Science fiction editors nurture short story writers — many sf insiders keep track of the short fiction markets and watch with keen interest the writers who are doing good work there, but until those writers manage to get a novel out, it's rare for the field at large to take note of them. — Read the rest

When I was working on Eastern Standard Tribe, my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told me that he thought that the electric light was a kind of drug, the kind of thing it takes a civilization a century to absorb, a hundred-year-long interregnum like the industrial century that Russian staggered through under the influence of vodka, or the lowlanders' gin-soaked hallucinogenic century. — Read the rest

Dave Winer's proposing adding a <ttl> element to RSS as a means of making it easier to insert RSS items into Gnutellanet. I love the idea of people working hard to augment the noninfringing uses of Gnutella — earlier today in one of the comments, someone mentioned that "98 percent of Kazaa users are engaged in infringement," and my houseguest, David Marusek, mentioned to me last night that he was under the impression that P2P networks were only used to infringe. — Read the rest

Science fiction author Judith Berman looks at a year's worth of issues of Asimov's and ponders the dearth of new, young sf readers. She raises the point that very few of the stories being published today are a celebration of the future (or indeed, the present), but rather they look backwards to the "Golden Age" of sf when writers were exuberant about tomorrow. — Read the rest

Fabulous vignette by the magnificent new sf writer, Benjamin Rosenbaum. If you can find a copy of the July issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, scarf it up and devour his brilliant, comical, touching debut short story, "The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale." — Read the rest