No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s pretty much the way we do things in this hemisphere.
Here in Ontario, we face the imminent prospect of double-barreled elections: one provincial, one federal. The leader of our provincial Conservative Party recently allowed that his plan to publicly fund religious schools would include taxpayer support of [...]

Got me a new agent. Howard Morhaim, about whom everyone raves (Jeff Vandermeer told me he’d gladly get into a knife fight for the man— I remain undecided as to whether this implies fierce loyalty, or just a sick desire on Jeff’s part to get into knife fights at the slightest provocation). It [...]

So, two more sets of negotiations concluded, two more contracts signed and sent: Arabesque (a new imprint of AST Publishing) is now officially putting out a Russian edition of Blindsight, and Bibliopolis is tasked with the Spanish translation.
Both have promised me input on cover layout.
Ominously, the editor at Arabesque — after having seen the [...]

Being the selection of a recent science item, hitherto unreported on this ‘crawl, most near and dear to my heart.
Oddly, most of the items I’ve noticed recently seem reminiscent of my second book Maelstrom — from this tell-us-something-we-don’t-know piece in the NY Times about the increasing fragility of complex technological systems to Naomi Klein’s new [...]

The good folks over at SF Signal have pointed me to results of a post-Hugo poll on their site, suggesting that a strong majority of their 72 respondents seem to think I was robbed. (This is especially gracious of them since they themselves didn’t like Blindsight all that much.) What’s really interesting about [...]

Okay, I need to tell no one here how very cool it is that moray eels have a second set of accessory jaws that leap out of their throat to handle difficult prey. You all know the obvious movie reference.
What I don’t know is, there are a couple of hundred species of moray eels [...]

New to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes“.
Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars [...]

So barring the possibility of some cruel hoax, Blindsight is now on the final ballot for the Auroras. They haven’t posted it officially yet, but my buddy Karl’s just announced that he’s on the same ballot for Sun of Suns, so I guess I’m not breaking any embargoes. For the nonCanadian among you [...]

My, the folks over at the Venter Institute have been busy lately. First they changed one microbe species into another by physically replacing its entire genome. They did this in their quest to create a synthetic organism, basically a chassis with the absolute minimum number of genes necessary for life, which could then [...]

Rainbows End took home the Hugo, coming from behind to unseat Novik’s Dragon opus in the fourth round. Congratulations to Vernor Vinge; the first story I ever read by the man was “Bookworm, Run!”, back in the mid seventies — it actually first ran in 1966, from Analog — and after forty years in [...]