Attention Bloomsbury: The World Is (Mostly) Not White

UPDATE (25 Jan 2010): Well, they’re changing the cover. But since the point of this post wasn’t just Magic Under Glass, but also about the problem of how it happened, I’m leaving the post as-is. The problem is not really isolated, just as the solution is already known — this World SF Blog post has a bigger discussion on covers and poor cover choices (as well as some good ones). ****** Dear Bloomsbury, You know what I’m emailing about, right? Yup. The cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. I’m white. I’m a reader. I love books. I buy books. …

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Nutters in Bloom, and Comments From Today, and a Song

Nutters: Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who do know something how little one actually knows. Comments: A few comments from today which need to be preserved, from a meeting on student presentation proposals, a chat with a professor about the Ministry of Education, and a chat with a teacher in another …

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RIMPAA Sues Whole Nation of Somalia in a Major New Lawsuit Aimed at Ending Piracy

Reuters (HOLLYWOOD) Jimmy Felching, the official representative of the RIMPAA (the new organization formed by the merger of the RIAA and the MPAA) announced this morning that the new organization has filed a claim against the entire nation of Somalia in their renewed war against “piracy.” Indeed, Felching urged President Obama to “help bring and end to piracy, even if violent means are necessary.” On being informed by a reporter at the press conference that this was “real piracy, not just downloading crappy flicks and tunes,” Felching turned red and left the room amid a chorus of laughter and jeers. …

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Válka s Mloky

“Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with …

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The Lone Ranger, and Tonto

So yesterday I was discussing Thomas King’s “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World” (from King’s collection One Good Story, That One), which is, well, sort of SF. “Sort of” because it’s not taking itself seriously as SF, but plays with SF tropes about aliens and spaceships. (Which, you know, is better than the kind of thing you see a lot of “mainstream” authors do — writing SF, and claiming it isn’t, because it’s not silly or dumb, or whatever. Yes, Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you. Come over here and say …

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