m. c. de marco

Via Michael Burstein: today’s issue of New Scientist is a Sci-Fi Special on the future of the genre. The main question is: Is science fiction dying?

In all the excitement of the election and NaNoWriMo, I missed the news that Michael Crichton passed away on November 4th. His long list of accomplishments can be found at Wikipedia.

Michael Burstein explains how and why he gave his new sf anthology I Remember the Future its own web page.

Walter Jon Williams blogs some brief words of doom and gloom for the publishing industry during this live reenactment of 1929:

[P]ublishing runs on credit. The money that is paid to authors is borrowed from banks. Banks aren’t even lending to other banks right now, let alone businesses with the tiny profit margins we see in publishing.

I’ve been working on my constructed language recently, so it’s about time to post this link from the livejournal conlangs community. But for a better list of references I recommend wikipedia, especially Essays on Language Design.

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.”