Category: Miscellaneous
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June 6
I visited the Normandy beaches in 1993, a year before the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the invasion. Beaches, of course, don't preserve anything very long. They are places where the ocean grinds everything to sand. Normandy's seashore is good for strolling; the water's too chilly for swimming and there are more rocks than sand. Most…
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Medical-Historical Notes
No, I'm fine. Not that kind of medical history. I'm talking about the history of medicine, and the history of medical terminology. A couple of weeks ago I had my annual checkup. It mostly consisted of a blood draw and some lab work, to see if all my humors were properly balanced. But I did…
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The Baristiary
For more than twenty years now I've done a lot of my writing in coffee shops. It gets me out of the house, I can observe my fellow pseudointellectuals and blowhards, and I don't have to answer the phone or walk the dog. In that time I've seen a lot of coffee shop employees. A…
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Unleash The Wild Hunt!
No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday? And if you haven't got the…
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Art Forms of the Future
Despite the portentious title (or pretentious, your choice), this is actually just a link to a video. Here are some musicians performing in zero-gee, courtesy of a plane flying parabolic arcs. I call this art of the future because I suspect in a few years' time we'll see something like this filmed in orbit.
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Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective
Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.
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Boskone 2019
This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in. Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves.…
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Class, Status, and SF Continued
The movie science fiction boom of the 1980s pumped a lot of money into the field. SF and fantasy authors began to get six-figure advances for novels, and sometimes cracked the New York Times bestseller list. Money and status usually go together (but not always, as we shall see in a moment), so you didn't hear…
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Class, Status, and SF
I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in…
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Firewood Observations
With the recent cold snap in New England I've been burning a lot of firewood. For several years now I've been cutting and splitting my own wood (it's cheaper than joining a health club for exercise), and I've learned quite a bit about firewood. Birch burns like plutonium, beetles will eat all the pine before…
The Cambias Digression 