CorKy.NeT Feeds

Carol Berg writes about her visit to Israel as ICon’s guest of honor in DeepGenre, a quirky blog by a group of SF&F writers.

Michael Swanwick, one of my favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy writers, has a new (new = like, since August) and regularly updated blog, Flogging Babel, to promote his upcoming book (The Dragons of Babel). He’s also set up a one-entry blog for a long essay of his decrying the inappropriate use of the term “Fix-Up“.
I [...]

M. John Harrison on writing Fantasy:
Hi, I got your book. You ask me how to make it different.
Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”…
When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone [...]

A fine rant from Peter Watts on how politicians’ disdain for science reflects the dismal disconnection from reality exhibited by policy makers:

In other words, both Law and Economics are human artifacts. They’re like Gibsonian cyberspace, a consensual hallucination that only works because everybody agrees to stay inside the playground. They’re Klingon Summer Camp, they’re Dungeons [...]

Ah, deadlines. I thrive on them, but abuse them mercilessly. Case in point:

Lolcats Dr. Who Comic (Season 1 finale all spoilered)
Bible Fight! - Mortal Kombat of Biblical proportions.
ʇxǝʇ uʍop ǝpısdn.

BTW, I mostly post links elsewhere now; see the sidebar for feeds.

The Carrington Event was an awesome solar flare that is the starting point for Stuart Clark's book The Sun Kings

In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, [...]

From the Wikipedia entry on William Hope Hodgeson's 1912 far-future SF novel, The Night Land:
Powdered Water and Food Tablets
Hodgson's hero sets out into the Night Land carrying lightweight food tablets and a sealed tube full of "water-powder." When a small quantity of this powder is exposed to air, it absorbs water rapidly from the air, [...]

I saw Pan's Labyrinth on the Saturday evening just before national Holocaust memorial day. After seeing it, I found the timing fitting.
Pan's Labyrinth isn't about the Holocaust, but it is set during World War 2, although in the isolation of post-civil-war Spain, the one country in Europe where the fascists actually won. And it [...]

The Golden Compass movie web site has some concept art and a pretty flash alethiometer; got there via a steampunk blog called Brass Goggles, where you can find some alethiometer combinations that unlock hidden images on the movie site).
I see that Daniel Craig (Lord Asriel) isn't the only actor from the last James Bond movie [...]

Planetocopia, the World dream bank:
Planetocopia is a group of model worlds supporting intelligent life. Some of these worlds are set in our future, some are alternate Earths, some are purely imaginary experiments in planetology, biology, sociology. They fall into four series: Tilt!, Futures, the Biosphere Variations, and Caprices.
[via Kenneth Hite]
The geology and the maps are [...]

What's sillier then a Dalek? A Dalek with an outrageous accent.

The two big Israeli geekfests are coming up in a couple of months, and neither of them have any web-presence so far. Bigor 2007, our annual multi-day roleplaying-centric event that is the ISRP’s tent-pole (flagpole?) is sometime in late March, Olamot (the SF&F and everything else con) should be sometime around then, and interested parties [...]

The Covenant looks like a pretty peculiar movie - one reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes described it as Harry Potter re-cast with underwear models, another says it really wishes it was Lost Boys; it’s like one of those teenage supernatural horror movies with sexy young actors, except with kewl powerz, romance and homoerotic high-school rivalry [...]