Category: Weblogs
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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…
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The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction
I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!
The Cambias Digression 