I cried for the Chimp, once. I was there for his birth. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, and an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not […]
We had a legend, we denizens of Eriophora, of a cavern— deep aft, almost as far back as the launch thrusters themselves— filled with diamonds. Not just ordinary diamonds, either: the uncut, hexagonal shit. Lonsdaleite. The toughest solid in the whole damn solar system— back when we shipped out, at least— and laser-readable to boot. […]
We lost fifteen million souls that day. Fifteen million brains sheathed in wraparound full-sensory experience more real than reality: skydiving, bug-hunting, fucking long-lost or imaginary lovers whose fraudulence was belied only by their perfection. Gang-bangs and first-person space battles shared by thousands— each feeding from that trickle of bandwidth keeping them safely partitioned one from […]
I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus. I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe […]
“The Colonel”, my Echopraxia tie-in, is slotted to go live at Tor.com over the next couple of days. I thought I’d give you a bit of a preview, in between checking out Snowpiercer and going my sixth round with the Russian bureaucracy. I don’t know whether Tor’s planning on luring anyone in with a teaser […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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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