Archive for fellow liars

Seeding Utopia. Like, Today.

Hey, Torontonians: There’s this local thing I’m a part of: “The Multiversity Collective” (which might not strike some of you as the coolest name on the block, until you learn that we narrowly avoided being called “Multiversity Our Strength”). Remember that “Toronto 2033” book that came out from Spacing a while back? That was the […]

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Changing Our Minds: “Story of Your Life” in Print and on Screen.

Spoilers. Duh. We share a secret prayer, we writers of short SF. We utter it whenever one of our stories is about to appear in public, and it goes like this: Please, Lord. Please, if it be Thy will, don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year. We supplicate thus because whenever Ted Chiang […]

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A Young Squid’s Illustrated Primer

Part the First: Liminal I recently did a kind of free-form interview with fellow US-border-guard-detainee Jasun Horsley, for his Liminalist podcast. It went okay, if you discount the fact that the Skype connection seemed to go dead without warning every couple of minutes. I certainly hope that we repeated our respective Qs and As often […]

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Culpa.

Say what you will about this Peter Watts guy, he sure has a way with punchy quotes. Just look at some of  the one-liners he’s come up with that various folks have pinched for their sigfiles, or stuck on the sidebars of their blogs. Just look at all the pithy wisdom quoted on GoodReads: “Science […]

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Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall

I admit to being both gratified and surprised by the impact that Ray Bradbury’s death is having on the cultural landscape. It’s not that his legacy doesn’t deserve the attention; I simply didn’t expect society to give a shit. He was, after all, a writer in a culture where a quarter of the population doesn’t […]

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Monstrous Affections.

The last story I read by David Nickle left me impotent for a week. That was a compliment. I have never actually read a bad story by David Nickle. I read an opaque story by him once: it was called “Pants Are For Company”, and it was (roughly) about personification of the abyss. I didn’t […]

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In Praise of Baby-Eating

Overcoming Bias is an erudite blog out out Oxford which focuses on the general theme of self-deception.  It plays around with everything from God to zombies, from neuroeconomics to applied statistics.  It is sometimes dry, but always substantive — and now, for a limited time only, it is also fucking hilarious. Blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky is […]

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All Hail the Mighty Ursabelle!

It takes a while sometimes for electrons to get all the way out here to Gibralter Point, but my understanding is that Elizabeth won the short-story Hugo last night for “Tideline”. And though I hate her for her talent and her characters, I also love her for her talent and her character. So, way to […]

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Look into the Mirror

So, my bud Dave Williams‘ The Mirrored Heavens is out, and garnering raves as well it should. And if you wander over to the appropriate Amazon page and click on the cover art, you’ll see a blurb dead center of the spread, courtesy of Stephen Baxter. But once you get your hands on the actual […]

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Fallen Giant

Sometimes, in defiance of entropy, little knots of complexity form in the universe and awaken. I have always found it deeply unjust that such knots, sooner or later, always stop. Each is unique, each cognizant, and if I were running things, the moment matter developed enough complexity to look around and start asking questions, well, […]

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