Monthly Archives: March 2009

Reader Request Week 2009 #4: Procreation

M asks: If we procreate, we doom civilization through overpopulation and depletion of resources. If we don’t procreate, we doom civilization through exacerbating an aging population. What’s a potentially procreative person to do? I don’t think it’s as bad as that, personally. For one thing, personally speaking I don’t think an aging population is a […]

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The Big Idea: Julia Angwin

Hey, folks, this Big Idea piece is a huge thrill for me to present to you because the author, Julia Angwin, is an friend of mine back to our college days, when she was an editor at the Chicago Maroon, the newspaper at which I was the editor-in-chief. We both went into newspapers, but unlike […]

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Hats Off to Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson explains how the last book of the Wheel of Time series became a 800,000(or so)-word trilogy. And all I can think is: Man, I have a hard enough time getting to 100,000 words. That man is just plain nuts. But I expect Wheel of Time fans will appreciate the extra effort in the […]

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Reader Request Week 2009 #2: OMW and Zoe’s Tale (and Angst and Pain)

Pwstrain asks: Compare and contrast the pain, angst, and horror of writing, agenting, selling OMW vs. Zoe. Differences in process / time / fear of failure? Just in case anyone doesn’t know (which given the crowd seems highly unlikley), “OMW” here is Old Man’s War, my first published novel, and “Zoe” is Zoe’s Tale, my […]

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Reader Request Week 2009 #1: SF YA These Days

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Reader Request Week 2009, in which you suggest the topics, and I write about them. Yes, I am your dancing monkey for the entire week! Please do not throw peanuts at me, however. They hurt my little head. As with last year, this I’m going to try to answer more […]

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Quick Review: Monsters Vs. Aliens

It was fun, but I can’t help but feeling the screenwriters left a lot on the table rather than putting it up on the screen; it had a lot of opportunities to be a whole lot sharper than it was. It’s also pretty obvious the screenwriters (of whom there were apparently many) are 80s babies, […]

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Various and Sundry, 3/27/09

A few things rattling about in my head: * Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald is going into great detail about traumatic brain injury, which is the media’s favorite injury of the last several weeks due to Natasha Richardson’s death of it. For those of you who don’t know, Jim’s an EMT, so he knows […]

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Peter Dubuque

Spare a moment in your day, if you would, for my friend Peter Dubuque, who passed on quite suddenly earlier this week. Peter and I met more than a dozen years ago when we were both part of the alt.society.gen-x newsgroup on USENET, which was my first real community online, and through which I gained […]

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The Recession and Science Fiction Movies

I know you’ve been staying up nights, clutching the sheets in terror, wondering helplessly if this recession thing we’ve got going on is going to mean horrible things for the continuous drip-feed of science fiction films that Hollywood provides to you. Well, relax, because how the recession will affect sf/f films is this week’s topic […]

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Hugo Nominees: Why Yes, You Can Get In On the Hugo Voter Packet Action

First, a status update on the state of the 2009 Hugo eBook Voter packet: I’m still in the process of getting permissions from various publishers to get as many of the Best Novel (and Best Related Book) nominees into the Hugo eBook packet as possible. At this point I hope to have the package ready […]

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Spanish TLC; Strange Horizons Review of ZT

Another Minotauro edition of one of my books, another pretty damn kick-ass cover. This one is for the Spanish edition of The Last Colony, although I note they went ahead and called it “The Lost Colony,” which formalizes in Spanish a common flub of the title in English. I don’t mind. I’ll note that when […]

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