The nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel: Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit […]
Category: Movies
(Wis)Con or Bust
In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They’re auctioning off a lot of interesting […]
Science Is Festive
Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so: The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished […]
What I’m Planning to Nominate for the Hugos
We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I’m eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I’d throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Foundation and Left Behind
In Friday’s installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist’s plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could’ve done better: If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they’d have consulted with […]
What I’m Doing at Boskone
Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I’ll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here’s my preliminary schedule:
Movies, A-Z
Nobody officially “tagged” me for this, but I saw it at Easily Distracted, and it seems like a good post topic for the Friday before Christmas. The idea is to pick one movie title for each letter of the alphabet. The list below the fold is not an attempt to come up with Great Films […]
The DiVincenzo Code
If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube. It doesn’t make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the […]
The Teleporter’s Dilemma
One of the annoying things about trying to explain quantum mechanics to a general audience is that the weirdness of the theory forces you to use incredibly convoluted examples. Pop-science books about quantum physics are full of schemes that the producers of the Saw movies would reject as implausibly complicated. I wish I was posting […]
Ethics in Science Fiction
A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question: As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course “Can Computers Think?” (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. […]