This year is the year of the tiger, which is my sign in the Asian zodiac. That means, of course, my age is a multiple of 12 — in fact, 36. This isn’t quite midway for average male life expectancy in the developed world, but on the other hand, for the men in my family, this might well be the average of halfway, or even farther along. So I guess I should be reflecting on where I’ve been, and where I want to go. Except, well, I did that a lot last year, and I feel like I’m on track, …
Month: March 2010
The Hub of… Outmoded Software Shackles?
In one of her essays, Ursula K. Le Guin described a Native American culture (I think it was) in which the metaphor for moving in the future was of people walking backwards — looking into the past, which can at least be seen, if not always so clearly, and walking blindly into the unforeseeable future. This metaphor came to mind today as I logged onto my Gmail account on one of the computers at my department office. At the top of the screen was a note informing anyone using the PC that Google was discontinuing support for the browser I …
Alone With Gandhari
As of right now, my story “Alone With Gandhari” is online as part of Clarkesworld issue #42. (Yeah!) If you’re more of a fiction listener, I can happily direct you to the wonderful Clarkesworld podcast of the story in which the tale is narrated (and briefly but insightfully commented upon) by the ever-sensitive and dramatic reader Kate Baker. The rest of the lineup is well worth checking out, too: Jeremy L.C. Jones interviews Kij Johnson (about, among other things, her Nebula-nominated “Spar,” which appeared alongside my last story in Clarkesworld) and there’s a short piece on neuroscience and SF by …
Ze Mad Rushin’
No, this is not a post about Rasputin, but about the first day of the spring semester, which was today. I had the first class for three of my four courses today. I’m not sure if it’s just that one of the two office assistants (the less helpful one, generally speaking) quit last week, but something has left our remaining office staff in a tailspin. I had syllabi for only one of my courses (the others were lost until after the second class had finished), and the attendance sheets are blank in the front, as I’ve never seen them before. …
Alone With Gandhari
“Alone With Gandhari” appeared in Clarkesworld #42, in March 2010. It was the second story I sold in 2010, but the first to be published. It was very sudden, and very exciting! Despite going from sale to print so quickly, my first attempt at the story was back in graduate school, sometime around 1999 or 2000. (In the dreadful original, a rural Indian named Gautam, working for his biotech-terrorist and nutball-Hindutvavādi uncle Prabinder, unwittingly unleashes a [fortunately quite unfeasible] biotech plague designed to emaciate cows and render them and their offspring permanently unfit for agricultural use; the plague ends up …