m. c. de marco

Via a mailing list: BoingBoing reposts a brief excerpt from The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos, my teacher from Odyssey.

Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. We could injure or kill people; we could burn structures or melt holes in walls; we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size.

Via del.icio.us sf again: Wired has an article about Neal Stephenson, his new book Anathem, his steampunk phase, and even his breakout with Snow Crash.

His early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. “We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we’d still be OK.”

Via whump.com: Lois McMaster Bujold spoke about genre in her guest of honor speech at the World Science Fiction Convention earlier this month. Here are her one-word genre definitions:

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency.

Via Night Shade Books: Concept Sci-fi has an interview with Walter Jon Williams up. On cyberpunk, he said:

I’d like to suggest that there were a few key concepts to cyberpunk: the idea that the future would be filled with a tangle of subcultures rather than a single monoculture; the notion that subcultures would adapt technology for their own purposes; that the subcultures would be webbed together by electronic media; and that the future would be saturated by mass media and by messages generated by large corporate entities acting exclusively and without conscience for their own profit and power.

Via a mailing list: the NJJN reports on a new Shakespearean authorship theory: the Dark Lady herself did it!

[John Hudson] gradually devised the latest approach to Shakespearean authorship, the Amelia Bassano Theory — recently recognized by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of the top eight authorship theories.

Michael Burstein kindly provides endorsements and information about tomorrow’s election in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Besides the vampires, I loved the use of obscure neurological conditions (such as the titular one) in Peter Watt’s Blindsight. One that stuck with me especially was Cotard’s syndrome, in which one of the female characters believes that she is, in fact, dead. Understandably, she has a hard time convincing the other characters of this fact since, aside from her change in affect, she is very much alive.