The Cambias Digression

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

  • Administrative Note

    I've had to switch over to moderated comments because of the astonishing volume of gibberish spam lately. If you post a brilliant comment or clever riposte and don't see it right away, that just means I have to approve it.

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  • Leveraging Our Desires

    My kids have recently become enamored of the TV show Leverage, watching it via Hulu and Netflix. If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically an updated Mission: Impossible. Each episode centers on an elaborate caper performed by our slightly shady heroes, typically aimed at righting some wrong. To make the episodes interesting, the…

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  • Win A Free Copy of A Darkling Sea!

    Tor Books are giving away a free review copy of my upcoming novel (gosh I love writing those words) A Darkling Sea. Go to the Tor.com Web site for details. If you're related to me, don't sign up.  

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  • Season of the Witch

    It's Halloween today, and I notice that Google has chosen to celebrate the day with a "Google Doodle" of a witch busy at her cauldron. I've written about Halloween witches elsewhere, but one of the links off the Google page (this one) reminded me of something I've come to detest in modern supernatural fiction. In…

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  • The Big News

    Over the past few weeks we've been bombarded with all sorts of news, as we always are: political goings-on, economic crises, scandals, celebrity shenanigans, sports . . . and it all seems terribly important and everyone feels it necessary to let the world know what they think via Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile there's this: fusion…

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  • Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

    I got a surprise package in the mail the other day: my contributor copy of Twenty-First Century Science Fiction, an anthology edited by David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It's a collection of stories by science fiction writers whose careers have taken off since the start of the new century, and the list of authors…

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  • The All-Seeing Eye

    I recently attended another stimulating meeting of the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop, and we wound up spending a lot of time talking about the use of the "omniscient" narrative voice in the work under discussion. For those who slept through high-school English, a work has an omniscient narrator when the narrative voice describes things which…

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  • Comic Con

    This past Friday my talented wife and I spent the day on the placid isle of Manhattan, at the New York Comic Con.  I've gone to a lot of science fiction and game conventions in my time. I've manned a booth at Gen-Con during the peak of the card game boom. I've been to World…

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  • Default Futures

    One of the comments on my last 'blog post, by the inimitable Alexander Jablokow, brings up the idea of what he describes as "consensus futurelike places" as story settings, which may or may not have anything to do with the author's actual vision of what the future will look like. This is not a new…

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  • Predicting The Future

    I read this guest post on Sarah Hoyt's 'blog, and it got me to thinking. As Mr. Begley points out, one of the constant refrains of our time is how "the future" that we're living in doesn't look like "the future" as depicted in mid-20th Century science fiction and popular science articles. We don't have…

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The Worldbuilding Index