The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • SEE THIS MOVIE

    The new Apollo 11 documentary is amazing. There's footage I've never seen, and I've probably watched every space documentary made in the past forty years. Skip this week's crop of comic book heroes and see a film about real ones. 

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  • The Philosophical Alphabet Inside Us

    Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . specifically to Restoration-era England, when a group of intellectually curious men began to meet at Gresham College to watch scientific experiments and discuss matters like how gravity works and whether blood circulates. At first they were informally known as the "Invisible College" (not…

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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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  • Retro-Review: Cabaret

    This weekend the family sat down to watch Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret, adapted from the famous 1966 musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb. It was a first time for all of us: my wife hadn't seen it, nor had my son, and I had only seen a heavily edited-for-television version in my youth…

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  • Pandemonium Event February 6!

    ". . . with awful ceremony and trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium . . . "  — Paradise Lost This Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. I'll be at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge for a reading, signing, and discussion of my new novel Arkad's World.…

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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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  • Open the Pod Bay!

    You can hear my voice on the latest episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, talking about Arkad's World and various digressions. Listen here.

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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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