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“Get used to disappointment.” —The Dread Pirate Roberts First, the PSA: Yeah, Freeze-Frame has evidently made the finals for the Campbell. Given its cohabitation with nine other worthy finalists, I’m not holding my breath. Realistically, I expect FFR will not win the Campbell a full day before it doesn’t win the Locus. On the plus […]

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The Hypersonic Weaponised Yogurt Award Nomination

  Welcome to the Starfish Initiative The green icon on the map represents the realtime location of an unmanned hypersonic glide vehicle carrying an explosive payload of 300 kilotons. You are one of a million participants randomly selected from the online community to choose its target. Use your keyboard, joystick, or saccadal interface to move […]

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Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor.

So that’s the title they went with. My suggestion was simply “Revenge Fantasies”, but apparently in the #MeToo era such a phrase, in isolation, is too evocative of “revenge porn”. I believe the whole sentient tumor thing was originally coined by Analee Newitz. As titles go, I admit that it rocks. I’m surprised to be […]

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Toronto 2033.

Okay, this time let’s see if I can post a fluffy little bit of writing news without provoking a political shitstorm: That Google-related fiblet  I posted a few weeks back? I can tell you where that comes from now. The critically-acclaimed urban-issues magazine Spacing is breaking with tradition and commemorating its 15th anniversary with a […]

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The Lviv International Book Forum: Huge Hearts, Tiny Bods.

The first thing that occurs to me when I arrive— well, the second thing, after wondering about all the little plumes of smoke rising from the surrounding countryside (which nobody in Lviv seems to know anything about)— is Hey, this place really reminds me of Poland. Lviv actually used to be part of Poland, back […]

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N.K. Jemisin, Alpha Gal

…and picking right up from where we left off last week, some of you may remember an ancient post about the Lone Star Tick, whose bite can provoke a fatal hyperallergenic reaction to “alpha-gal” (galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose for the pedants in the audience), a monosaccharide found only in the meat of nonprimate mammals. You may remember cool […]

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Opera and Inspiration

An assortment of news: Publisher’s Weekly gave a starred review to Freeze-Frame Revolution, and also listed it among 2018’s Best Summer Reads. Of course, Publisher’s Weekly also gave a starred review to βehemoth, so some of you might want to factor that into your equation…   The Inspirational Listsicle About two years ago, I was […]

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Incorruptible, Indeed.

So I wake up in a stranger’s apartment in Montreal, reset routers and flush/re-register dns caches and do all those other should-be-unnecessary things this piece-of-shit Lenovo demands I do before it spins some internal roulette wheel to decide whether or not I’ll have internet access this morning, and— What do you know. The X-Prize people […]

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Promises, Promises

Yeah, it’s been a while. There’ve been deadlines: stories to complete, talks to give. Mostly met now, for the time being. I’m never deadline-free but the pressure’s off for a month or so. I’m back. There’s Bulgaria to report on, the usual crunchy science if I can get caught up.  Today, though, I’m going to […]

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Proof of Principle

Dateline Munich. Scribbled in a near-coma while sitting in a chair which has been designed by aliens who obviously never looked at a human body. Which is to say, at an airport… Something slipped under my radar last week. I was nose-deep in “Freeze-Frame Revolution” and the upcoming Ratio talk, and when I looked up […]

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