Archive for fiblet

Collateral.

Daniel might like this. A couple of posts back (in a thread of comments I still haven’t had time to answer), he asked if I’d be willing to write military SF unconstrained by the limits of  video games.  As it turns out, I already have: “The Colonel“, upcoming from Tor.com, is sorta-military— although the only […]

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A Christmas Wish.

Things fall apart, Yeats wrote. He didn’t know the half of it. He was obsessed with trivia: Humanity, Good and Evil, angry imaginary gods. But it’s not just some rickety social construct coming apart at the seams. It’s the whole fucking universe. There’s no second coming for our cosmos, no Big Crunch after the Bang, […]

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Since There Still Seems to be Some Confusion Over the Title…

They’d arrived at what had once been some kind of air-traffic hub: a low-slung control shack whose walls and roof came together in a wraparound band of soot-stained windows angled at the sky. Two dead helicopters and a one-winged jump jet littered a scorched expanse of tarmac and landing bullseyes, barely visible beneath the scoring. […]

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Hot Shot.

You do understand: It has to be your choice. They never stopped telling me I was free to leave. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; they told me as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life-support […]

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Collection Agency.

This appears to be Collection Season. Over in Spain Ad Astra is just out (including a nicely unconventional introduction by Manuel de los Reyes, the translator of Blindsight); that’s the cover to the right, and I rather like the whole outer-space/inner-brain riff contained therein. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the official release date for  Beyond […]

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This insane Ferris wheel stretched a hundred meters from side to side.

But it was an ephemeral contraption of twigs and straws next to the wall of metal looming behind it. Seen from dead-on the Drive would be a disk: a landscape turned on edge, a hard-edged topography of ridges and trenches and right angles. But out here on the wounded rim Brüks could see the mass […]

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A Bit of a Twilight Vibe

(Or, Another of a number of reasons why I haven’t had time to post anything lately…) Valerie kissed him two nights later. He didn’t even know she was there until her hand snapped closed around the back of his neck, spun him around faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time his […]

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The Final Fiblet.

For a while, anyway.  I handed Echopraxia in to my editor this week. It is out of my hands now; even were I seized by sudden insecurity and tried to race down to New York to snatch it physically from her hands, I wouldn’t get past the border. Now I must do other things (including […]

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A Fragment of FinnCon, a Dribble of Dumbspeech

I finished the last of 32 Finncon slides today.  Here’s #25.   Now all I have to do is write a talk that has at least a tenuous connection to the other 31. In other news, an excerpt from an upcoming article in The New Yorker: There are people here who repeatedly drown themselves in […]

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The Point of the Exercise.

“The Bicamerals would think of it as more of a— a pilgrimage, I suppose.” His mouth tightened at one corner: a small lopsided grimace. “You remember the Theseus mission.” It was too rhetorical for a question mark. “Of course.” “You know the fuelling technology it used— uses.” Brüks shrugged. “Icarus cracks the antimatter, masers out […]

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