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…)
Tag: WRITING
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 …
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 …
When ATMs Attack, or, How Things are Going in Depok/Jakarta
I’ll be going back to Jakarta tomorrow because a certain ATM has decided to swallow my Samsung Card (a credit card) and not spit it out again. Put the card in the machine, watch it crash, watching Windows reboot (with the Diebold brand name proudly displayed, of course!)… quite a sad sight. The first time it happened was a week ago, and I thought it was a freak accident. Turns out, no, not at all. Samsung Cards crash BNC ATM machines in Jakarta, it seems. Or at least, at the mall I was at. Other than that, things are going …
Purdy Covers and More Publication News…
Well, it’s time for an update. I may have mentioned some of this before, but to make sure I’ve mentioned it all: Carmelo Rafala has added my story, “The Broken Pathway” to The Immersion Book of SF, Vol. 1, which is due out sometime this spring from Immersion Press. It’s a story near to my heart, because it’s set in the neighborhood where I live, but a little over a century ago, during the Sino-Japanese war (the bit that trespassed into what is now “Korean” territory). It features Korean monks, a Japanese geomancer, some government officials, and the mountain I …
Jakarta Blues
No, not blues in the Robert Johnson/Mississippi Fred McDowell/Miles Davis sense. Blue is the color of the cabs you want to take in Jakarta: Blue Bird Taksi (Taxi) are cabs I have found most trustworthy around here. To answer a few questions: yes, I am in an apartment in Jakarta, which I have rented for the months of January and February, the break between fall semester 2009 and spring semester 2010. No, I have not permanently relocated to Jakarta. Yes, I am enjoying the warm weather, though mostly because there are air conditioners all over the place. That said, it’s …
General Update
Work: I am almost completely caught up on my grading. (The only things I haven’t graded are the reaction papers I was handed last night. I do, however, also need to tabulate participation scores for student discussions — their peers have ranked them; I think I can get a trust office assistant to do most of the data entry, though, which is nice.)”I am almost completely caught up on my grading” doesn’t sound impressive, I know, but usually at this point in the semester, I have a couple of huge piles to get through. I got a bunch done on …
Shine Acceptance
Well, way back when, Jetse de Vries (who, I’m pleased to see, makes me feel much better about my own lack of posting here — he hasn’t updated since summer!) announced he would be putting together a short-story collection titled Shine, featuring optimistic near-future SF. Of course, I immediately began working on something, and what do you know? When I met him this summer, he told me that he was taking the story I submitted to him. Between that and the bearhug he gave me on first meeting, Jetse made quite an impression on me, and it was a very …
Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content
The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take up residence in the caves of Afghanistan or up in North Korea just to get the freedom to research things that have been banned by everyone else. It reminded me of a funny thing an ex-student in Beijing told me — this blog is blocked …
“Of Melei, of Ulthar” — Online at Clarkesworld!
New story! New story! My newest story — “Of Melei, of Ulthar” — is online in the October 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, along with a very intense story titled “Spar,” by Kij Johnson. (This is also the story being podcast this month at Clarkesworld, too!) (Interestingly, we have shared a table of contents before, in Asimov’s SF, last summer. It’s a pleasure to share a TOC once more with as distinguished an author as Johnson. Here’s her website, by the way.) EDIT: Ugh, and as someone whose own work has appeared in the nonfiction section of Clarkesworld before (here), I’m …