My brother Jim took home a bunch of my father’s old slides after his visit with my Mom over the weekend, and has started scanning some of them and posting them over on Facebook. I particularly liked this one. This is me (the little guy), my brother Dwight (five years older to the day) and …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/the-girl-who-named-pluto-rip.mp3[/podcast] Three years ago I wrote a column about someone I was astonished I’d never heard of until that week: Venetia Phair (née Burney), at the time an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher in Epsom, England. At the age of 11 Venetia suggested the name Pluto for what was then (and for many decades after) considered the …
I’m in the process (or about to begin the process) of revising the most recent YA SF proposal I sent to my agent, and I’m leaning toward taking it an entirely different way, turning it into a first-person adventure a la my Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star. Old beginning: Teetering on tiptoe atop a spindly …
…is in today’s LeaderPost. It begins: The set of people who like both symphony orchestras and screaming guitars is generally thought of as small, but based on Guitar Heroes, Saturday’s Regina Symphony Orchestra Shumiatcher Pops concert featuring Jack Semple, it’s at least as large as the seating capacity of the Conexus Arts Centre. Semple often …
The first week of my month-long series of book giveaways to promote the release of my new science fiction novel Terra Insegura (have I mentioned I have a new novel out? I have? Well, what do you know!) has passed, and we have two winners! Michael Carter, who lives in British Columbia, has won the …
Over the weekend SF Canada, Canada’s national association of speculative fiction professionals, as it says on our website, held its AGM (in virtual format using forum software, as befits a science fictiony organization), and rather foolishly elected me president. I’m doing my best not to let my new-found power go to my head, but it …
My posting at Futurismic continues to be sporadic, but I do manage a few, and it does tend to be where I put the science-related stuff (except for my column) I used to post here. Here’s a round-up of my most recent Futurismic stuff: Do newspapers have a future? Is Twitter a threat to morality …
That’s Don D’Ammassa’s take on Terra Insegura, which while not the unadulterated rave that is all any author wants to see in every review, isn’t so bad coming from someone who was pretty lukewarm toward Marseguro. D’Ammassa also thinks my characters are too tense, to which I guess I’d say, hey, they’ve got plenty to …
This proposed underwater robot with a sense of touch looks scarily like what I imagined the Selkie-tracking “killerbots” of Marseguro to be. Mine had tentacles rather than articulated arms, but still: Oh, and for comparison’s sake, here’s how cover artist Steve Stone pictured the killerbot:
…which features guitarist Jack Semple, is up at the Regina LeaderPost. It begins: Most electric guitar players don’t get much opportunity — if any — to play with a symphony orchestra. Most electric guitar players aren’t Jack Semple, who’s headlining the Regina Symphony Orchestra’s final Shumiatcher Pops concert of the year, Guitar Heroes, on Saturday …
I’ve posted the wonderful Stephan Martiniere cover art of Terra Insegura several times on my blog (and of course it’s plastered all over my website as a whole), but today I finally got my author’s copies of the actual book. It’s always a thrill to see the actual published book, and I’m pleased to see …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/blue-brain.mp3[/podcast] Ah, the human brain. Seat of consciousness, miracle of creation or evolution (discuss amongst yourselves), able to jump to tall conclusions in a single bound, so incredibly complex that we’ll never be able to understand how it works. Um, not so fast. A year and a half ago, scientists at the Blue Brain Project …
