Category: Weblogs
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This Summer’s Big Idea
I’ve got a guest post up at John Scalzi’s “Whatever” ‘blog, part of his series of other writers discussing the “big ideas” in their books. For this entry I decided to talk about my ideas for Venus terraforming — or, as I dubbed it in The Ishtar Deception, “cryoforming.” The capsule summary is that making…
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Ishtar Deception: The Movie
No, Hollywood hasn’t come calling (yet). But the Campaign for the American Reader’s “My Book: The Movie” blog has a post up featuring my thoughts on who I’d cast as various characters in The Ishtar Deception. Read it here.
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The Ishtar Deception Faces Its First Test
“The Page 69 Test” is a blog, part of the “Campaign for the American Reader” family of Web sites. Its specific focus is on whether Page 69 of a book gives the reader a good idea of what the rest of the volume is like. (It’s based on a quote from Marshall McLuhan.) You can…
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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?…
The Cambias Digression 