SF
drorzel | March 23, 2007There are two Presidential election campaigns underway at the moment. Both feature establishment / incumbent parties that are pretty much in disarrary, wracked by missteps and accusations of corruption. They're opposed by candidates who are somewhat unexpected.
One of these campaigns is unquestionably Important, and will affect my life and the lives of everyone in the world in the future. The other is, well, not terribly important to me, or 99.999999% of the world's population.
Am I a Bad Person, then, for being absolutely captivated by the train wreck that is the SFWA presidential election (…
drorzel | March 14, 2007Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn't much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it's the Season of the Bracket...
I'm not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don't care about hoops have to find other outlets for the impulse to construct match-ups between various concepts, and arrange them in a single elimination tournament:
Locally, there's the Science Spring Showdown. I'll be announcing the first-round winners in the "Orbit" bracket on Friday, and while my decisions are final, they are…
drorzel | March 11, 2007Everybody 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 are two things about this that are sort of striking: First, that while I may be the only ScienceBlogs person who regularly attends SF conventions, and yet, I've read fewer of these books than most of the other people who have responded. Second, that there really aren't any books on the unread list that…
drorzel | March 5, 2007James 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...
Suggestions are welcome, bearing in mind of course that James's definition of SF pretty much demands MilSpec certification for the bolts holding the rockets together, so it's a little tough to come up with books that meet his standards. I'm a little more forgiving of dodgy science…
drorzel | February 26, 2007Kate 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 forget what I was doing that kept me from seeing this talk, but I was on a panel with him later, and he's a charming fellow. If I'd known he was spending the year on sabbatical in New York, I would've tried to get him booked into our colloquium schedule...
Anyway, the talk was a…
drorzel | February 24, 2007Speaking (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 bloody, and darkly comic.
He apparently sells very well in the UK, but hasn't really managed to crack the US market, to the point where his most recent SF novel (The Algebraist) is only available from a small press. It's a shame, because he's written some absolutely…
drorzel | February 24, 2007OVer 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 see the number of people who are shocked at how low the income is-- $67,000 is a pretty respectable salary in the world of people who don't play around on the Internet all that often, and it's probably in the ninety-somethingth percentile for fiction writers.
Of course, I'm amused…
drorzel | February 22, 2007This 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 quantum phenomena.
There's some SF relevance to the ideas involved in EPR and Bell's Theorem. A number of authors have name-checked the idea, most notably Charlie Stross citing "entangled particles" as the mechanism for FTL communications in…
drorzel | February 21, 2007John 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 intelligence, who likes to read but does not read science fiction.
2. Write with that person in mind.
He goes on to note that these same rules apply to other genres of fiction. He does not, however, make the point that this is also excellent advice for non-fiction…
drorzel | February 20, 2007As 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 difficult, given that I end up having basically no opinion in so many of the categories.
I do have a few ideas about works to nominate, but I'd like to hear suggestions from other people. So, what should I be putting on my nominating ballot this year? I'll put the list of categories below, with my…
drorzel | February 20, 2007Kate 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 probably drive away all the readers who weren't actually there.
The highlight of the con was probably in the socializing, anyway-- dinner at Legal Test Kitchen with Debra Doyle and James Macdonald and Yoon Ha Lee, hanging out outside the con suite with Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, hanging out in the hotel…
drorzel | February 20, 2007The 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 much will this cost?Vince Docherty, Chad Orzel, Peggy Rae Sapienza
The other two people on the panel turn out to be the official agents for the Nippon 2007 Worldcon for North America (PRS) and Europe (VD), making me the token guy-with-a-website. They've also been to Japan…
drorzel | February 6, 2007For the half-dozen people who care, my Boskone panel schedule for this year, with a few comments. I don't know for sure that this is the final final version-- I might get added to something else-- but it's probably pretty close.
Fri 8:00pm, 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 much could all this cost? Vince Docherty, Chad Orzel, Peggy Rae Sapienza
I'm sure I'm not the only…
drorzel | February 5, 2007Cognitive Daily proves it scientifically.
I love it when life imitates Brust.
drorzel | February 5, 2007The new issue of Locus arrived just before we left, so I spent some time reading reviews and commentary on the SF field over the weekend. It's actually a pretty good issue-- the retro-review of Isaac Asimov is interesting, and while the John Barnes interview doesn't ask the important question ("How can the same person write Mother of Storms and One for the Morning Glory?"), he says some interesting things about his other books. There's also a recommended reading list, that I'll probably comment on elsewhere.
I do want to mention, though, the review column by Gary K. Wolfe, in which he reads a…
drorzel | January 21, 2007Via Neil Gaiman, I learn that:
John Crowley (author of Little, Big)has a LiveJournal...
... where he's collecting suggestions for reference works for people seeking to invent interesting fantasy worlds...
...and he's come up with a great class exercise/ party game for the results:
Can't do it for the upcoming class, but for a class in fantasy fiction what could be done is to print out these titles and others similar on separate cards,,and have each student pick two at random, and combine the central elements of each. North Korea under the Kims combined with voodoo and zombies. Or Indian…
drorzel | January 20, 2007I'm going to be on a few program items at Boskone again this year. The highly preliminary schedule I received a couple of days ago includes a Saturday afternoon talk on "Spooky Action at a Distance," which will be a sort of popular-audience explanation of the EPR Paradox and Bell's Theorem. "Weird Quantum Phenomena" was a hit last year, so I'm looking forward to this one.
Also on the list is "SF and the History of Science," described thusly:
Let's look at SF (or historical fantasy) involving the development of science: something that's interested writers in our genre from DeCamp to…
drorzel | January 5, 2007Jack McDevitt is a prolific SF author, with a couple of running series that recently appeared in booklog entries here (see, for example, Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!!). Coincidentally, he's also talked to the Slush God, in an interview posted at SciFi Weekly. He says a bunch of interesting stuff, and not just about his books:
The problem with space travel is that you don't really get much benefit from it. Not the sort that makes, say, for better transportation or better toothpaste. NASA is always trying to sell it that way, but the money would be better spent developing the toothpaste…
drorzel | January 2, 2007The 2007 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Yokohama, Japan this year, and Kate and I are going. It's a bit of a delayed celebration for my tenure-- I'll be on sabbatical in the Fall, so I won't need to worry about prepping a class for September, and we can make it a nice vacation.
We're planning to spend about three weeks there, and have most of the itinerary sketched out (details below the fold), but there's a little time left unaccounted for. I'm pretty sure there are people reading this from Japan, and I know there are lots of people who have more knowledge of the country…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there's some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on planetary systems more like our own than the oddballs that have been detected so far. I also agree with James's prediction in comments:
[T]he first detection by this system of a roughly Earth-massed planet around a sunlike star will involve a "who ordered that?" moment as the new world turns out…