Category: Weblogs
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Ho Ho Ho
It’s coming up on Christmas Eve, and that means it’s beginning to look a lot like NORAD. The oddest, silliest, yet curiously sweetest Christmas-themed site, another front in the U.S. armed forces’ ongoing war against irony.
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If The Miranda Conspiracy Was A Movie
Marshal Zeringue's Web site "My Book, The Movie" asks authors to imagine their books as films and pick actors for the lead roles. It's a fun question to answer — sometimes I know exactly who to cast, because I pictured a specific actor when writing the piece. And sometimes I have to go on a…
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The Page 69 Test
Marshal Zeringue's "Page 69 Test" blog asks writers a simple question: what does one random page say about your book? He always picks the same one (presumably with help from Bill & Ted) but one could use a random number generator and come up with a custom version for every new book. Anyway, he asked…
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Miranda Conspiracy Interview With Paul Semel
I did an email interview with Paul Semel, a noted reviewer and critic of games, media, and fiction. It's pretty interesting, and fills in some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the Billion Worlds and the oddly out-of-sequence nature of that sequence. You can read the interview here. For visual interest, I asked Midjourney…
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The Zoo Hypothesis: Objections
Recently the magisterial Centauri Dreams 'blog ran a post by Paul Gilster about the "Copernican Principle" and how it conflicts with the observed facts about life in the Universe. (Short version: the Copernican Principle says Earth should be an average world, but if that's the case, why don't we see more signs of life elsewhere?…
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Why I Didn’t Do It This Year
Long-time readers of this blog (all three of you) may remember that in December I usually include a link to one of my favorite Web sites: the NORAD Santa Tracker. Why didn't I run it? Blame the Task & Purpose blog, a very interesting Web zine about military matters. This December they ran a very entertaining…
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Scarab Mission NOW Available
I have eyewitness confirmation from a friend that my new novel The Scarab Mission has reached bookstores. Or a bookstore, anyway. I'm assuming the distributor isn't just shipping to one retailer. So to everyone who has been waiting for a copy, go forth and buy! And if your local store doesn't have The Scarab Mission,…
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Howard Hughes Vindicated!
DARPA, the Defense Department's official mad-scientist branch, has signed contracts with two companies to develop a super-heavy-lift flying boat for military transport. Here's the article from the US Naval Institute Web site. Why resurrect a technology which has been sidelined for seventy years? Since the end of World War II flying boats have hung on…
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I’ve Got A Little List . . .
The nice people at Shepherd.com asked me to submit a list of five book recommendations. I chose "The Best Novels About Exploring Big Things In Space." It's kind of a funny coincidence that I chose that topic, right when I have a book out about people exploring a ruined space habitat. Their site has loads…
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DiFilippo on Scarabs
Paul DiFilippo put up a very kind review of The Scarab Mission in his Locus column. You can read it here, at Locus Online. The summary: he liked it. The review calls Scarab a "rousing, unstoppable, non-stop adventure," which is good to hear. That's what I wanted to write, but you never know if you…
The Cambias Digression 