Archive for February, 2008

Law & Order: Victims of Reality Unit

So Prozac and its ilk prove to be, for the most part, about as clinically effective as a sugar pill. Which kicks loose an idea for a story that’s been rattling around in my head for a few years now: A man diagnosed with terminal cancer is beating the odds with the help of a […]

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I’ve Just Handed My Pinball Crown To Him

I may have mentioned a fellow by the name of Dave Williams (maybe not here — I know I’ve mentioned him in interviews, at least). The guy came at me out of the blue a few years back via a mutual friend, and asked me to check out some skiffy prose he was working on1. […]

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Our Souls in a New Machine

A couple of items hit me within the same 24-hour period this week: a little humanoid robot that performs interpretive dance numbers based on the brainwave and REM patterns of sleeping humans, and a noncorporeal digital artiste that builds paintings inspired by phrases we meat puppets offer up to it. I’ve seen human paintings and […]

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Ducks, Squirrels, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction.

Many months ago now, sf überfan Jan Stinson interviewed me for the Internet Review of Science Fiction — just before IRoSF lapsed into dormancy. In all honesty, I kind of forgot about it in the meantime. But the chrysalis has hatched, the new glorious IRoSF is letting its new wings dry in the sun (and […]

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And Now, In Keeping With Our Policy of Giving Equal Time To Opposing Viewpoints…

Jena Snyder, another On Spec alumnus, posted a minority opinion following my last rant. This is not the first time she and I have disagreed; there have been sparks and brush fires over the years, and we have not always liked each other. We continue to see eye-to-elbow on some things (certain traits of the […]

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"Don’t get the idea that On Spec is a democracy."

Regular visitors to this site may remember that for a number of years now, I’ve been one of the fiction editors at the Canadian SF magazine On Spec. They first approached me back in 1999; I’ve served pretty much continuously since, except for a brief hiatus back in 2001 when I felt that the fear […]

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The Green Spine

So the trade paperback edition of Blindsight showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Not bad, I guess. You’ve seen it before: they truncated the teaser text on the back, but that left room for more blurbage (which, I’m pleased to note, was actually about Blindsight this time around). I’m a bit doubtful about the presence […]

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Petepourri

Just a few bits of miscellanea on my way out the door: The disgustingly-but-unforgettably-named “Puppy Buckets” has posted a review of the soon-to-be-resurrected Starfish — although if you hang out here regularly you’ll already know whether the book’s any good. We’re less than a month away from the paperback edition of Blindsight, and to drum […]

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Athieist Group Born Again

Pursuant to Monday’s post, that MySpace athiests group is back up and running. According to a comment on Charlie Stross’s blog, MySpace never deleted it in the first place; rather, it was hacked out of existence by some third party. Anybody have any further info on this? According to the story I linked to before, […]

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The Frogs Are Swarming in the Milk

Going over the transcript of the Locus interview I did last July. I am grateful that Locus gives its interviewees the opportunity to “clarify or expand upon” aspects of such transcripts; I had no idea that such a smart guy as myself could be so inarticulate and unfocused. During the course of the actual interview […]

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