Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 12

After six years, I’ve decided to reopen comments. So, say hello or something

Six years ago, overwhelmed by moderation duties to keep the comments a safe place and facing health issues that left me with very little energy, I shut down comments.

People predicted doom! Well, I kept blogging and the blog grew.

Then I stopped blogging, basically. I retreated to social media. But then, slowly, I stopped feeling like that was home as well. Social media impact grew, but blogging tailed off hard, and the readership on the site as well.

So, now this year I’ve experimented a lit...

A Reaction to the #Brexit Vote

Many of you probably don’t realize this, but I’m not American. It’s always a shock, and some folks in essays have continually flubbed it, but I’m actually a Brit in technicality.

Truth is, my mom’s the real Brit. Born in Middlesex, time spent in London, then sailed with her family around the Mediterranean and ended up in New Zealand for her equivalent of high school before rejoining the family who had sailed to Grenada. Grenada then, being a part of the last bits of British Empire.

Grenada ac...

Tumblr crossposting test post

Okay, so I don’t have a Facebook page (I don’t know why, I hate Facebook, I grudgingly use an account for local and family stuff, but that’s it), but I have set up a Tumblr account and am testing cross posting from this site.

That is all this is.

update: The Tumblr is here. Testing what happens when I update a post after the fact!

Ratcatcher a Best Science Fiction of the Year: Recommended Reading List

Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld posted a short list of 2015 short stories recommended for reading, and that included my short story Ratcatcher:

All of those stories are represented in the anthology, either as a reprints or in the recommended reading list at the end of the book. They were all great stories that deserve attention, so with my publisher’s permission, I share that list with you now:

(Via Best Science Fiction of the Year: Recommended Reading List – Neil Clarke.)

Rat catcher is the ori...

I’ll have a story in Fractures: Extraordinary Tales from the Halo Canon

This may have been dropped between the cracks as I was in the middle of another deadline when news dropped. But one of the more frequent questions I get is, is anything more Halo coming out from me? Well, I can reveal that on September 20th, I have a novelette coming out in a collection of Halo stories called Fractures:

Launch once more into galaxy-spanning conflict and legendary heroism…shards of an ever-expanding journey where human and alien alike find their finest hours in facing their g...

SpaceX plans first launch of a reused first stage rocket in a few months

This is the next big milestone, now that SpaceX is regularly re-landing first stage boosters, that SpaceX relaunch a booster and begin testing how that lifecycle works.

This article I’m linking talks about SpaceX talking to insurers about how the system is working so they can basically certify a used booster for launch in the new few months, and how much that will bring down their cost (to the $40 millions a launch range. Compared to $225 mil for their competition.

Pretty amazing stuff:

lis...

Whole villages are abandoned/depopulated in rural Europe at the same time refugees are held at border…

I just said this in an interview off the cuff, but I thought I wanted to snag it and post it here:

Right now I’m reading stories about how whole villages are going up for sale for a few bucks in rural Europe because the countryside is being depopulated as generations move into the city and abandon the country. Meanwhile, at the border, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are being brutalized, starved, whole generations of minds deprived.

We are failing at connecting dots due to horrible narra...

Today I’m celebrating 10 years of being a freelancer

Ten years, man! Ten years! I’ve been freelancer/writer/whatever for 10 years now, sailing my own ship:

Ten years ago I had just published my very first novel. It had been out a few months. But I never got to enjoy or dwell on my first novel experience because I learned just a couple days before my book was to launch that I was going to be out of a job by the end of summer.

I spent that February, March and April:

-finishing the manuscript of my second novel, Ragamuffin, in a panic. I didn’t k...

VI Lit Fest Day One

I love meeting fellow tech enthuisasts!

Also of note and discussed in the video, Stanley Sneed’s 3-d modeling of St. Croix: