Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
I guess this is how it should be done, if you’re going to be a science-fiction writer with a blog.
My first visit, and Charlie Stross’s site leaves me feeling utterly inadequate. I’m going to erase my entire blogsite and leave a “So sorry” sign hanging there in its place. Damn.… Read more
“Alice” fans and critics (see my last post) likely fall into opposing iPad and Kindle/Sony camps. The former will view Alice as a new and improved kind of reading: “Great! It’s just like browsing the Internet.” The latter — i.e. those who actually enjoy extended reading — will view it with horror: “Whoa! This is just one more patch of digital quicksand.”
In the spirit of deteriorating attention spans and debilitated Muses, and because it’s way easier than writing … Read more
The future of the book
“Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?”
1. Alice. To say I resemble a Ludditic old fart is … Read more
One burning issue du jour concerns the relative merits of Kindles and iPads. But rarely, now, does discussion swing around to the real advantages of traditional paper books.
If only paper books could perform word searches, eh? How I wished for the missing function when I went looking for a passage I dimly remembered reading somewhere—something to the effect that night air was sweating the fragrance of jasmine. I wanted to use something dangerously similar in a story I was … Read more
I sit in my office sweating.
The 27-inch iMac gazes blankly at me from inside its raincoat, the pair of us waiting for the air-conditioner repairmen to arrive. It all started when my old PC laptop clapped out, exposing me to attack by the consumerist virus waiting in ambush. Next thing I knew, I was the proudish owner of a nearly-new iMac super doodah. And now look. The world is disintegrating.
Long-slumbering volcano erupts in Sumatra. Floods in Pakistan, India … Read more
We really are all getting wired together. I let this one out into the wild a week ago, just to a couple of friends, and copies keep coming back to me by e-mail from increasingly unlikely sources. It’s a little scary. I guess it’s too late to decide my mining background should be a deep, dark secret (as mining-day secrets should be).
The photo was taken quite some time ago, if I may be coy about it (as hardrock miners … Read more
Asteroids on sinister trajectories, suicide bombers in china shops. Epidemic this and high-cholesterol that. The failure of the Western metaphysic. Soaring cheese prices. 
Black holes of uncertain provenance and appetite lurking in the centers of our galaxies, shrinking public spaces in which to smoke, vanishing marine fisheries, incompatibility between relativity and quantum theory, Sarah Palin, language extinctions, cross-species viral infections, cougars in suburban gardens, friggin’ Chihuahuas everywhere not to mention toy poodles, global warming, entropy… Where will it all end? … Read more