Encouraged by people around me to have a small early mid-life crisis, I decided to go to Noreascon, the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston (September 2nd to 6th). Today I registered and reserved a plane ticket and hotel room.
I’ve got until tomorrow to fill in a ballot for the Hugo Awards (including retro-Hugos for 1953!)
Sean Stewart’s account of writing for the A.I. tie-in web game, known among the developers as “The Beast”, and done in secret by a team headed by Jordan Weisman at Microsoft’s Game Group.
“Existential crisis of killer geisha robot, side order of Socrates,” I said. “When do you need that?”
“Um… 4 hours?”
“Four hours?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll have a draft in 2.”
Damn, I thought, hanging up, I LOVE this job!
Reuters: Don Quixote to Ride Again on Cosmic Rescue Mission:
The European Space Agency has given high priority to a Spanish project which aims to attack an approaching asteroid to see whether spacecraft can deflect a body that may in future be on a collision course with earth.
Two craft will set out — one named after the valiant knight of Cervantes’ classic tale, the other after his long-suffering servant Sancho Panza.
Spacecraft Sancho will circle the chosen asteroid while the other — aping its literary namesake — smashes headlong into the target.
The orbiting Sancho and earth-based telescopes will watch closely to see what, if any, effect the impact has on the speed and direction of the asteroid.
At the same time Sancho, being in orbit around the asteroid, will be able to detect fragments thrown from it by the impact and get a glimpse of its internal structure.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s speech at a BookExpo America breakfast event (link from Neil Gaiman‘s site):
Assumption 1: The characters are white. Even when they aren’t white in the text, they are white on the cover….
I have received letters that broke my heart, from adolescents of color in this country and in England, telling me that when they realized that Ged and the other Archipelagans in the Earthsea books are not white people, they felt included in the world of literary and movie fantasy for the first time. Worth thinking about?
Photo of Robert Sheckley, taken at the interview I conducted with him. I blame the expression on my face on lack of sleep.
