m. c. de marco

Via io9: Night Shade Books put Ted Chiang’s Hugo-nominated short story “Exhalation” online in various formats.

It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end.

The Hugo Awards were announced last night. I don't believe I've read or seen any of the winners, but you can read at least one of the winners online, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang, at F&SF.

Also (via SFScope), the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were also announced. The big winner in both cases was The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon:

Someone somewhere in the news aggregator linked to an old post of John Scalzi’s with his final word on the perpetual debate over the difference between SF and F:

You walk up to the main character of the story in question and say: “Hey! Main character! That deus ex machina doodad you have on your belt, does it have, like, a battery?”

If he says “Why, yes, there’s a tiny nuclear fuel cell in there that will power this baby for 10,000 planetary revolutions,” well, then, you’ve got some science fiction there.

I was telling someone about this story and decided to google it, without any hope of finding it online. But apparently it was reprinted by Fantastic Metropolis a few years ago and is still up there: “Division by Zero” by Ted Chiang.

I saw on MetaFilter that Ted Chiang has a novella coming out from Subterranean Press:

In medieval Baghdad, a penniless man is brought before the most powerful man in the world, the caliph himself, to tell his story. It begins with a walk in the bazaar, but soon grows into a tale unlike any other told in the caliph’s empire.