Category: Travel
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The Trip to Iceland, Day 2
We slept for about twelve hours on our first night in Iceland, then went downstairs for an excellent buffet breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Lots of different breads, a kind of baked scrambled egg dish, skyr (Icelandic yogurt — you're going to see that a lot), cold cuts, and so forth. And a very exotic…
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The Trip to Iceland, Day 1 (second part)
The ferry ride to Heimaey took about 20 minutes and was the quietest boat ride I've ever taken. We later discovered that the good ship Herjolfur is electric-powered, with a big recharging plug on the dock at Heimaey. It makes sense for a short-haul ship in a country with plentiful geothermal power and no local…
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The Trip to Iceland, Day 1 (first part)
A few years ago the Crack Team and I went to Europe aboard Iceland Air, because they had good cheap fares and fly out of Logan Airport in Boston. Like all modern long-haul airliners, the plane had little video screens at each seat, and those little screens played promotional videos about how swell it would…
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Discover an Archipelago of Lost Worlds
I'm pleased to report that the long-awaited anthology Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms is now available. It's edited by John Joseph Adams and features a pretty impressive lineup of contributors, including Theodora Goss, Cadwell Turnbull, and Becky Chambers. The seventeen stories in the book are all about visits to hidden or imaginary lands — a…
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The Zydeco Operation
The Godel Operation comes to Acadiana! On Wednesday, September 22, I'll be doing a reading and signing at southwestern Louisiana's premier book shop, Beausoleil Books of Lafayette, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome. Come on down and hear some of the adventures of Daslakh and Zee in the Billion…
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Steely-Eyed Missile Robot
Congratulations to the Perseverance rover on its successful landing on Mars. Pretty impressive job for a rookie pilot! Let's all wish it a long career of rolling around the Martian landscape. ADDENDUM: Almost as impressive as the landing is the amazing improvement in data return. Forty-five years ago, when I watched the Viking landings on…
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The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the First
Historians and students of literature were tremendously excited by the recent announcement by Oxford University that several volumes of unpublished notes by Lemuel Gulliver had been found in the Bodleian Library. Dr. Gulliver was a little-known 18th-century explorer, the first European to visit Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and other lands of the Pacific. His accounts of…
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PhilCon 2020 Goes Virtual
This year's PhilCon — the venerable Philadelphia-era science fiction con now in its 84th year — is going to be all-online. On the plus side that means no New Jersey traffic and mall food; on the minus side it means no spontaneous conversations in the hotel lobby, no room parties, and no basic human contact.…
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Twenty Years!
Today marks a significant anniversary. Twenty years ago, on October 31, 2000, the first crew launched to the International Space Station. Station crews are called "Expeditions," so Expedition 1 began on that date. We're currently on Expedition 64, with three in the pipeline and many more planned. The Expeditions overlap, so that the new crew…
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The First CYBER WorldCon!
This year's World Science Fiction Convention was to have taken place in New Zealand, but since that country is entirely sealed off from the outside world, the convention has gone entirely on-line. It's a CYBER WorldCon! See the link here. Despite obstacles the show will go on! I'm participating in several events, without leaving my…
The Cambias Digression 