Australian fantasy author Justine Larbalestier, whose novel Magic or Madness was named a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for best young-adult SF/fantasy novel of the year, told SCI FI Wire that the book came about because she’s cranky.
A note about the comments —
Your comment will automatically be held for moderation if you include a URL, either in the URL field or in the body of the comment. Sometimes I’m not able to approve comments right away, so they might sit in the queue for a few hours, so if you want your comment to show up right away, avoid using URLs.
BTW, I appreciate the database suggestions; after I have time to think about it some more and try out some of these suggestions, I’ll post about it again. Do keep the ideas coming, if you have any…
SCI FI Weekly just published a Q&A I did with Kim Stanley Robinson, in which we mainly discuss his Science in the Capitol trilogy, and Global Warming.
Your Mars books were about terraforming Mars; the Science in the Capital series is to some degree are about terraforming Earth (to repair the effects of global warming). What are our chances of doing either before it’s too late?
Robinson: We are the major force changing the surface and atmosphere of Earth now (we’re faster than the natural processes changing it, I mean), so terraforming is indeed physically possible, but we’re not used to thinking of ourselves in that role. It would require a changed paradigm, which admitted that we have become some kind of conscious “global biosphere maintenance stewards,” and that environmental thinking now ought to include an openness to at least the concept of doing things deliberately to reduce our impacts. We have to reconceptualize wilderness as being a kind of ethical position as well as a piece of land, meaning active and conscious stewardship on our part. This is a kind of interaction with the Earth that has been going on semi-consciously since the beginning of humankind, but now it’s become obvious, and it is a frightening thing to contemplate, because it’s a stupendously complex system and we don’t know enough to do what we now need to. And the unintended further consequences of anything we might try are hard to predict.
Even so, we may eventually agree through the U.N. or something else to try some things, if we get desperate enough. The crux may come if the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet begins to detach in a big way. About a quarter of the world’s population lives very near the coastline, and the disruptions there could be so severe that we would contemplate mitigating actions.
Beyond that, I think it’s best not to put the problem as a question concerning whether we are “too late” or not, because either answer leads to a kind of non-active response: i.e., if it’s not too late, I don’t have to change, and if it is too late, then there’s no point in changing, so either way–party on! Also, in some sense, encompassing all life on Earth, it will never be “too late,” in that even if we trigger a mass extinction event, the surviving life would quickly fill the empty niches and evolve onward. You can’t kill life on Earth, short of toasting it in an expanding sun or whatnot. But you can kill a lot of species, and wreck a lot of biomes, and you can probably wreck human civilization for a time, which would kill a lot of people. So I think it’s better to think of it in terms of “do we save more or do we save less,” of the other species in particular.
Lunar Knights, Konami’s new game for the Nintendo DS, is an action role-playing game featuring a pair of vampire hunters, Dennis Lee at Konami Digital Entertainment told SCI FI Wire.
The Darkness, the Top Cow comic that combines the Mafia with magic, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and was inspired by a love for antiheroes and the dark side of humanity, Marc Silvestri, founder and chief executive of Top Cow Productions, told SCI FI Wire.
Who’s going to Wiscon this year? The website doesn’t list any of the members to protect member privacy, which is all nice and good, except, you know, if you’re trying to plan ahead for things like interviews and/or figure out who you’ll be hanging out with, or find a roommate, etc.
So, who’s going?
I’m trying to figure out what might be the easiest way to compile a database cataloging all of the short fiction I own (i.e., all of the stories contained in anthologies, collections, or magazines I own). You know, because it’s useful to know these things, especially since I hope to sell more anthologies in the future, some of which are likely to be reprint anthologies. Also, it would be useful if I just want to read a particular story too. I’ve purchased new anthologies on a number of occasions to read one particular story, only to later discover I already had it in another book.
What I’d want to be able to do is not only catalogue everything, but also be able to tag entries, so that I could label stories not only by author, publication, and date, but also by sub-genre and whatever else comes to mind.
At the moment, after some discussions with some HaX0R d00dz, I’m contemplating going with the rather simple Excel to sort the data, but if anyone has any other suggestions I’m all ears. Basically, I want it to be easily searchable, I want to be able to have fields for Title, Author, Publication, Date, Length, and Tags, and I’d like it to be somewhat easy to enter vast sums of information into it.
One problem I’ve run into in my initial explorations of Excel is that although I can cut and paste a TOC from the ISFDB or Locus Index, I have to tediously move the author into the author column, etc. I’m not sure there’s any way around that. Is there?
As the dutiful Steve Buchheit noticed, the comment system on my blog has been restored, at least for now. Usually when I announce that the comments are back up, spammers attack and force us to shut them down. We’ll see how it works this time around.
At Comic Con last weekend, someone handed me a little credit card-sized card embalzoned with the Star Wars logo. Turns out it’s an offer to get a free download of the audiobook Star Wars: Legacy of the Force #1: Betrayal by Aaron Allston. If you go to www.audible.com/comiccon, you should be able to download it for free. There’s no code on the card, so anyone should be able to go grab it.
Hard SF author Wil McCarthy, whose novel To Crush the Moon was named a finalist for the Nebula Award, told SCI FI Wire that the book is about extremely long-lived people in a society with big ambitions.
