Fanniversary

35 years ago I printed up and sent out my first zine (The Diagonal Relationship). Most of the good stuff in my life comes from that.

Dialogue

Abi Sutherland has a talk with sf about the need to be Serious and Respectable. I also want to do a recommendation and link to the Elizabeth Bear essay that started the discussion. The need has become so pathological that even when two cool guys like Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo do a book about the best sf of the last 25 years, they feel they have to include that thing that came out of Cormac McCarthy's mental rectum.

Thanx to Making Light.

Belated

I missed International Day against DRM. But I still want to cheer on Baen, O'Reilly, Tor, and all the other publishers who've realized it's in their best interests not to go along with that stuff.

Thanx to Making Light.

Accuracy

Wheelchairs, like boobs, are often drawn by people who don't know what they really look like. Here are pointers on the former.

Thanx to Making Light.

Fringe benefits of being a police officer

Copping a feel

Thanx to Mercury Rising.

Candidate

You may have noticed that all the conservative cats 'n kittens have been busy making an uneasy peace with the notion that the former governor of the People's Republic Of Obamacare And Gay Marriage is your Republican nominee for president of the United States. Just the other day, he met with some of the wilder fauna of the conservative biosphere, and he landed the endorsement of The Girl With The Faraway Eyes and, it is rumored, a full 60 percent of the voices in her head.

--Charles P. Pierce. Read the whole thing.

Senator Rosewater Memorial Post

Woman on British TV displays armpit hair. Thus far, it does not appear to have led to all of that fun stuff from Left Behind.

Thanx to andrewducker

The rocketship on the spine

Charles Stross on why there may not be an sf genre/category much longer.

The camera doesn't lie. That's our job.

Idealistic 14-year old makes bizarre suggestion to fashion magazine. Grownups decide it wouldn't work.

Thanx to andrewducker

Respectable Sheckley

This is important. The New York Review of Books (or as some of us call it, the other New York Review) has a book program, bringing back really good writers such as Dwight Macdonald and Murray Kempton. Now they have ventured into our ghetto, bringing back one of our best. In my arrogant opinion, Robert Sheckley was the funniest writer of them all at the time when Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, and William Tenn were in their prime. Store of the Worlds collects 26 of his best stories. (They aren't perfect; they left out "Bad Madicine," just as they missed the evisceration of Colin Wilson when they collected Macdonald's best.) Two more things: If you want to know more about him, my review of the NESFA collection of his novels, which I also recommend extremely, and the ToC:( Read more... )