Here I am, high (35th floor of the International Hotel) above Calgary, awaiting the results of this year’s Locus Awards. (UPDATE: This was initially live-blogged, with photos and links added later.) Charles Brown began with a comic introduction of Connie Willis (first pretending to think he was at a literary conference in China). Charles Brown …
From left to right: Calgary’s deputy mayor, Guest of Honour S. M. Stirling, Publisher Guest of Honour Tom Doherty, Editor Guest of Honour David G. Hartwell, Canadian Guest of Honour Dave Duncan, Artist Guest of Honour Mark Ferrari, Fan Guests of Honour Eileen Capes and Cliff Samuels. A busy day at Westercon yesterday. We attended …
Hot from Westercon: Long-form EnglishWolf Pack, Edo van Belkom Short-form EnglishWhen the Morning Stars Sang Together, Isaac Szpindel Long-form FrenchLes Mémoires de l’Arc, Michèle Laframboise Short-form FrenchCeux qui ne comptent pas, Michèle Laframboise English otherRelativity: Essays and Stories, Robert J. Sawyer Artistic achievementMartin Springett Fan publicationOpuntia, Dale Speirs Fan organizationBrian Upward, I.D.I.C. Fan otherKaren Linsley, …
The second panel I attended on Thursday night at Westercon was on Great Openings. S.M. Stirling was on hand again, along with Barb Geller-Smith, Andrew Foley and David G. Hartwell, a senior editor at Tor Books. Hartwell rather dominated the panel, mainly because all the would-be authors in the audience were most anxious to hear …
Westercon doesn’t really get underway until today–the opening ceremonies are at noon–but there was some “pre-convention” programming last night, and I took in a couple of panels. I didn’t take complete notes–I was using my Harrier and although I’m pretty fast with a stylus on a virtual keyboard, I’m not fast enough to catch everything …
There’s been no posting for the past couple of days because we’ve been travelling, first to Drumheller to see the Royal Tyrrell Museum (that’s me and Alice out front, about to get eaten) then to Calgary for Westercon, which starts tonight. I’ll be pretty busy but hope to post a blog comment now and then …
Most people think of fossils as neatly mounted skeletons displayed in cool, clean museums with nicely printed labels at their feet. That’s pretty much the way I think of them at the moment, since I’m writing this in the lunch room of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Unfortunately they don’t occur that way …
The space station is getting a voice-activated computer. Astronauts hope it’s more like the Star Trek version than the 2001 version.
Technovelgy reports on (and has a photo of) the Philip K. Dick Robot, an android representation of the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick, now on display at NextFest 2005 in Chicago. It’s either really cool, or really creepy. Your call.
Those three words, or words very much like them, may have appeared in science fiction stories and movies more than any other phrase…and now, it appears, they may someday be spoken in earnest by astronauts on the moon.
I’ve written here and here about recent efforts to decipher ancient manuscripts using multi-spectral imaging, the photographing of the manuscripts under various wavelengths of light (a technique originally developed for the study of celestial bodies by spacecraft). Here’s yet another project using the same technique, this time at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, …
Here’s an interesting story about a probably planetary system around Fomalhaut (at 25 light-years’ distance, a nearby star as these things go)–but what’s really cool is the accompanying image. Sauron lives!
