I’m at Norwescon, and one of the panels I was on posed the question, “Can science fiction save the world?” Much discussion ensued, most of it excellent. Conclusions: Maybe. It has (think of Orwell, Bradbury, etc). It’s often the stories and books that are written with no agenda to save the world that have an …
Writers who have created science fiction that could save the world Read More »
First, this was a hard read. I had to work for it. Maybe that’s partly because I have been pretty stressed by family stuff, but it took me two full weeks to read this, about 12 days to get through the first half and then not much time to finish. But I loved it. I’ve …
Reading Recommendation: The City in the City by China Mieville Read More »
And while I may not be able to get those, I’m likely to get an implant or implants of some kind before I die. And that’s not from being an early adopter. For more about what we are doing today with implants from RFID through silk, take a look at my newest column at Futurismic.
In science fiction, we’ve long assumed that distance would disappear. We do it with FTL travel so we can take our characters between planets the way we now travel between cities, we do it with instant communication devices, and we use teleportation. We wave our science fictional hands at the challenges of communicating over great …
What’s Green, exciting, and then (hopefully) unnoticed? Read More »
I just finished Anathem. It was a marathon read. I read it across my Kindle (easy on the eyes) and the softback (hard for me; getting old!) and the audio book (awesome.  Well-read and well-produced). I hated it at the beginning. Slow, ponderous. But once I got into it, the world is so deep and so …
Reading Recommendation: Anathem (Neal Stephenson) Read More »
And I get to learn a lot from the things others have to offer. I have a career in tech, an avocation as a writer, a calling as a futurist, and a family. So I had to pull some smart sf out of my memory banks from a time in my life when I had …
In which the SF Signal Mind Meld includes me on Smart SF Movies Read More »
Kudos to the Locus team for organizing an excellent event. I had a great time, and enjoyed this year’s awards even more than last year’s. A couple of highlights: Most of the winners were there. So were a lot of the nominees. That was very nice. It’s a lot more fun to see someone win …
Locus Awards and Science Fiction Hall of Fame Report Read More »
I will be at the autographing, and probably staying through the induction of the honorees into the SF Hall of Fame. There will be a lot of us there – I count at least 16 writers! See you at the Lake Union Courtyard Marriott.
I didn’t set out for these books to be about war, at least not when I wrote The Silver Ship and the Sea. Current events, however, have a way of coloring artistic work, even science fiction that’s being written about a far future. The Iraq War and The Silver Ship and the Sea started at …
