For those who read Apex this past year, but haven’t voted yet in the first annual Apex year’s best story poll: this weekend is your last chance to vote for whichever story you liked best. Which may or may not have been my short story, “Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” but if it was, I sure appreciate your vote! (The full list of stories is here, in case you want to check out the rest…)
Month: January 2010
Good Enough for Nancy Kress…
While I was still ill, last week, I noticed an email had come in from someone at Asimov’s SF. It was concerning a request for permission to license “Dhuluma No More” to DailyLit, to do that thing DailyLit does. (And what it does is, it lets you read bite-sized chunks of a text by email or RSS feed on what is, obviously, a daily basis.) My first reaction was, “Huh?” followed sudden memories of rants by friends who follow Harlan Ellison on the idea of never giving anything away for free. Then I thought of people like Cory Doctorow and …
Webster’s Is a Threat to Children Everywhere: Burn Down the Libraries; Ban the Internet; Return to the Dark Ages!
Making the Twitter rounds: Moronic parents demand Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary be banned from schools. Moronic school board complies. (Okay, maybe just temporarily.) (Another link here.) Yup, it seems some parent noticed a definition for “oral sex” in the dictionary, freaked out because their fourth/fifth grader might look up that word and see something “graphically sexual,” and then asked the school to ban the book. The thing about people like this is that banning one book is never enough. If they manage to ban one book, the next thing you know they’re going to be making blacklists and rooting through …
If it’s going to be stuck in my head I refuse to suffer alone…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVjhwgoYc3U … because stuff one liked in high school should never be revisited without at least a little virtual support. And to think my friend Mike let me blast that in his mom’s car as we drove through the cold prairie night.
Soraya Intercine Films’ UFO
Yup, this is what was on TV tonight: A prime time comedy SF TV show in Indonesian about a UFO and some people who retrieved it and made friends with the aliens inside. Miss Jiwaku also picked out what seems to be (maybe!) some kind of plot thread involving some kind of device (a drug, maybe?) that makes people smart, and which was malfunctioning, or misrouted, or something, and the “dealer” of that tech who seemed to be in some sort of trouble. I found it bewildering, to be honest. It seems to be a 2010 production, from the one …
There Goes the Neighborhood
In the Starbucks where Miss Jiwaku and I hang out in Depok — she studies, I work on stuff — demographics have finally hit, like shit on a fan. The demographics I’m talking about are micropopulation dynamics: the national demographics of enrollment in her Bahasa Indonesian language program at University of Jakarta have shifted, such that there’s a lot more Koreans at the university, in the neighborhood, and… at our Starbucks. (Which prompted this advice from Miss Jiwaku to a new Korean student who enrolled this semester, a friend of a friend already enrolled last semester: “DON’T hang out with …
A History of Modern Burma by Michael W. Charney
I read A History of Modern Burma as part of the research for my current fiction project, and as histories go, I’m happy with what I learned as well as the perspective I gained from the text. Charney is clear, thoughtful, and quite balanced: he tries to at least make clear the kinds of thinking and motivation that underlied the military rulers of Burma in ages past and present, differentiating between them and their policies, as well at working to show what effect those policies had on the common people of Burma. Another point of strong interest is the role …
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin Before I say anything about this novel, two disclosures and a warning: First: N.K. Jemisin is a friend; we met at the Launch Pad workshop last summer, and we went to and hung out at WorldCon last summer too. I don’t think that baises me too much: I know a number of people who are excellent and wonderful like Jemisin, but I wouldn’t say nice things about their books just on account of that; but anyway, in the interests of honesty and disclosure, I figured it’s best to throw that out there… Second: …
Want!
I so want this poster for my office.
Fever, What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Trip to the Local Immigration Office, and a Final Positive Turn
I’ve been quite ill this week — not quite just food poisoning, but something a little more vindictive and involved, though not in a sentient sense. The same intestinal upset as last time, but with an added element: a burning fever on Thursday night, and fever (slightly less severe, but much sweatier) again on Friday evening. It was the kind of fever where you say things you don’t recall saying the next day, and dream of Japanese Solutionatronic devices shaped like giant wok lids except that they aren’t physical objects but rather abstract mathematical structures which, given any question, can …