Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 20

You can help Larry Smith, the well known traveling convention bookseller, after rollover van accident

On Sept 8, 2015, while returning from Dragoncon in Atlanta to home in Columbus, Ohio, Larry Smith of Larry Smith Books, along with family friend Joni Dashoff, had a rollover accident in the book-laden van on Interstate 75, at the Niota exit in Tennessee. Joni was apparently unscathed. Larry was not so lucky. After some gentle persuasion he was taken to Parkwest Medical Center in Knoxville. After assessment there, he was transferred to University of Tennessee Hospital for admission.

(Via Help...

Are you reading Greg Van Eekhout’s latest book, Dragon Coast? You should be!

Dragons. Dragons are fun. So Dragon Coast has a huge Pacific firedrake wreaking destruction across California.

Heists are fun. So someone steals the dragon and Daniel has to masquerade as the brother he killed and steal a powerful bone in front of the assembled aristocracy of Northern California, including the most powerful osteomancer in the world.

(Via Whatever | I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND.)

Greg Van Eekhout’s Osteomancer books are cracking good reading. You should be reading the...

Anthology LOOSED UPON THE WORLD is Now Available, contains two stories of mine!

From John Joseph Adams’s website:

This is the definitive collection of climate fiction from John Joseph Adams, the acclaimed editor of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and Wastelands. These provacative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle and hope.

Join the bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and twenty others as they presciently explore the great...

Some things I’ve learned after eleven days without social media

On the 21st I mentioned I was going on Twitter vacation. I’ve seen a few articles from people who go on social media diets. They come back from down the hill to with their wisdom.

-The most obvious effect is that I’m a lot less distracted. I have ADHD, and I wrote about my last productivity hack on the blog (4 Hacks I’ve Used To Focus Harder While Writing on a Computer), but declaring I’m off social media publicly, while logging out of it and deleting all apps from my phone… has boosted produ...

President wants more icebreakers in Arctic

One of the things I noticed while researching Arctic Rising was that the US was not able to do much force-projection or borders patrolling, search and rescue, etc with the current fleet, ranking the US below much, much smaller nations with Arctic borders. Looks like someone is paying attention finally:

President Obama on Tuesday will propose speeding the acquisition and building of new Coast Guard icebreakers that can operate year-round in the nation’s polar regions, part of an effort to clo...

Adventures in Unbearable Pain

On Friday I was going to write about things I had learned since declaring a social media vacation the week before, but was experiencing stabbing pains in a very delicate area and wasn’t in the mood.

Saturday chimney repair people came. Emily (and I’ve been helping) has done some remodeling in the house to put down new floors and we found that our chimney was leaking and rotting a piece of floor. I repaired that but we got a chimney quote. That was expensive, but due to higher than normal amou...

Digging on artist Mike Winkelmann’s futuristic illustrations here

What I love about this is the John Berkey sense of scale in these. Berkey’s massive starships almost always guaranteed a purchase from me when I was browsing the used book store.

Artist Mike Winkelmann has been making an illustration every day for eight years. As his website will tell you, he hasn’t broken routine for 3,039 days—and over that time his illustrations and process have drastically evolved. In his most recent digital illustrations, he imagines dreamlike futuristic landscapes.

A...

Some thoughts on the herding of POC writers into diversity panels

Kate Elliott writes:

In the wake of 2009’s #Racefail discussion, LJ blogger delux-vivens (much lamented since her passing) asked for a wild unicorn herd check in to show that people frequently told they don’t read SFF and aren’t present in SFF circles do in fact exist. In some ways I personally think of this as the first unofficial “diversity panel.”

I seem to recall the token diversity panel goes back further than that. I sat on a panel at Conjose in 2002 called “Ebony Age of Science Fiction...

Queen’s Young Leaders looking for more Caribbean applications for people working with youth or amazing young leaders

This came through my inbox, I thought I’d pass it along duly. If you are in the Caribbean and doing anything with the youth, you might want to nominate youths doing spectacular things or nominate someone doing something for the young folk:

I am writing on behalf of The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, Comic Relief and The Royal Commonwealth Society, with a request for you to support the Queen’s Young Leaders Awards.

Following the success of the 2015 Queen’s Young Leaders Awards, the sea...

What the alternate Hugo Ballot would likely have been

I haven’t seen anyone post something showing what the ballot for fiction would have looked like without the ballot stuffing, so here was my quick attempt to piece together what it would have been:

Best Novel

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Lock In by John Scalzi
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennet

Best Novella

The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Pat Rothfuss
The Regular by Ken Liu
Yesterday’s Kin by Nancy Kress
Gran...