Everybody and their brother is doing the “which Significant SF books have you read?” thing today, so I might as well play along. The list is below, and just because I’m lazy, I’ve opted to strike out the ones I haven’t read, rather than bolding the ones I have. It’s less typing that way. There… Continue reading Significant SF
Category: SF
The Planets
James Nicoll is soliciting recommendations for a series of novels about the planets of the Solar System. His first pass: Mercury: Venus: Earth: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke Mars: Jupiter: Jupiter Fred and Carol Pohl (ed) Saturn: Uranus: Neptune: Triton, Samuel R. Delany As you can see, there are some gaps…
Brother Guy On Ice
Kate has posted a report on Boskone talk by Brother Guy Consolmagno, on hunting for meteorites in Antarctica. Guy is a Jesuit brother, and also a research astronomer for the Vatican, and a better example of the peaceful coexistence of science and religion would be hard to find. He’s also a very entertaining speaker. I… Continue reading Brother Guy On Ice
Iain (M.) Banks Interviewed
Speaking (as we were) of the glamourour life of writers, Bookslut points to an interview with Iain Banks. If you’re not familiar with Banks, he’s a prolific author who alternates “mainstream” literary novels (as “Iain Banks”) with genre SF novels (as “Iain M. Banks”). With a very few exceptions, his books are very smart, fairly… Continue reading Iain (M.) Banks Interviewed
The Writing Life
OVer at the Whatever, Senor BaconCat has two long posts on the glamorous life of a successful SF writer: one breaking down his income from SF writing in detail, and the other talking about why he’s talking about money. The comment threads are also lively and interesting in their own right. It’s particularly funny to… Continue reading The Writing Life
Spooky Action at a Distance
This is an approximate transcription of my physics talk from Boskone, titled “Spooky Action at a Distance,” in which I attempted to give a reasonable explanation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (“EPR” hereafter) paper and Bell’s Theorem. This was sort of a follow-on from last year’s “Weird Quantum Phenomena,” meant to highlight a specific class of weird… Continue reading Spooky Action at a Distance
Comprehensible Is the New Black
John Scalzi is being railroaded into heading a new movement in SF: The New Comprehensible. He disdains manifestoes (“people who issue literary manifestos should be thrown into jet engines”), but does offer a set of precepts for people seeking to write in the New Comprehensible: 1. Think of an actual person you know, of reasonable… Continue reading Comprehensible Is the New Black
Hugo Recommendations
As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we’re eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF’s version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I’ve had this opportunity, and it’s always kind of… Continue reading Hugo Recommendations
Boskone in Brief
Kate and I spent the weekend in Boston for the science fiction convention Boskone, which we’ve been going to every year for the past several years. I’m not going to do a detailed recap of everything that was said on every panel that I went to, mostly because I don’t keep notes. Also, that would… Continue reading Boskone in Brief
Boskone: Visiting Japan
The first panel I was on was travel advice for the Japanese Worldcon: Visiting Japan, If we attend the Worldcon in Yokohama this August, what knowledge should we bring along? What ten phrases are essential? What societal differences should we be prepared to accommodate? What are Japanese SF fans like? What will we eat? How… Continue reading Boskone: Visiting Japan