Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 8

Quick Book Review: City of Stairs

I have to admit to being a bit late to post this, as I read City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennet earlier last month but during my three weeks of being sick as a dog. So I didn’t get a review up.

This is a great example of what I would have called, prior to the early 2000s, “Urban Fantasy.” That is to say, a fantasy novel set in a city and influenced by historical cities. The genre label of Urban Fantasy was rebadged by publishers taking paranormal romance into a wider market a while back,...

Quick Book Review: The Stars Are Legion

Kameron Hurley has a new book out, The Stars Are Legion:

I snagged my own hardcover not that long ago. It’s full of squicky biological science world building, dying wordlets, a really wild SF-nal set up that reminds me of Hardfought by Greg Bear (mixed with Ann Leckie) in the way that it gives you such a close, intimate view of a world that has long since forgotten where it came from and what it is that it might as well be secondary world fantasy in some ways.

It’s a fast and intense read th...

Capsule Review: Seveneves & Aurora

I just finished reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson while I was sick and confined to either bed or couch the last five or so days.

It’s a combination of disaster-survival novel in the first third, with the last third being science fiction novel set five thousand years in the future.

It features things I would have loved when I was in my late teens or early 20s, and still enjoy reading now: competent engineers making hard rational choices! Space hardware! The concept that we can engineer our...

Toy Planes, my short story, is now a short comic online!

My short story Toy Planes is one of my more well received short stories at readings (particularly in the islands).

Pablo Defendini has done an amazing job of turning it into a short comic online. It’s fully responsive and serves as a testbed for demonstrating how to do fully responsive comics online that Pablo put together. It’s also a fantastic rendition of Toy Planes in graphic form. Please check it out at www.toy-planes.com.

Open Thread Friday: What’s your favorite quote about writing?

Today I’m curious what your favorite quotes about writing are?

I keep a page of my favorite quotes on the second page of my bullet journal, and one of them is:

“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” -Walt Whitman

What is yours?

And what are your creative weekend plans?

This is how I Bullet Journal

Hi, I’m Tobias Buckell, a science fiction writer, and this is how I Bullet Journal.

I mentioned I’d started bullet journalling on twitter and people were curious and suggested I create a blog post.

So in September, I had been seeing people mentioning bullet journals and seen some Instagram links and Pinterest accounts about bullet journaling.

I was a bit put off by it all because there were pictures like this:

Or like this:

It seemed like a group of scrapbookers vomited all over to-do lists...

Capsule Review: Toussaint Louverture by Philippe Girard

Several people hit me up to note that Toussaint Louverture by Philippe Girard just came out. It’s apparently the first biography of Louverture that’s English first that has come out in 80 years.

I snagged a copy that arrived last night and read the book promptly.

It’s best read if you already have an appreciation of Caribbean history. Something like Carrie Gibson’s Empire’s Crossroads is a great start.

Haiti’s history and the US is so intertwined. I could write a large essay. But short of it...

Capsule Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

One of my regrets about how scheduled I was last year was that I got very little time to read books I was hearing buzzed about. Planetfall was one of those on my shortlist. I finally got to pull this one off my shelf and start reading it a couple days ago.

This was an interesting book because the main character struggles with a disorder and trying to plumb too much about what that is gives away some of the core secrets of the book, and this book is interestingly constructed as a mystery. A l...

SpaceX Plans to Launch over 4,000 satelites to blanket the Earth in high speed internet

Well, this is somewhat stunning and exciting:

SpaceX just asked the FCC to launch 4,425 satellites – Business Insider: “SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by the Mars-hungry tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, just made a big move to envelop the Earth in high-speed internet coverage.

…

“With deployment of the first 800 satellites, SpaceX will be able to provide widespread U.S. and international coverage for broadband services,” SpaceX wrote. “Once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the...

So that one dude got elected…

In some ways it is Deja Vu all over again…

I’m 37, I arrived in this country during the Clinton administration and not too long after that, I saw Gore win the popular vote and lose the electoral college and I subsequently lived through 8 years of the Bush administration.

It was freaky to see Gore miss the election by losing the electoral college but having won the popular vote. It was devastating to see a conservative judge swing the vote over to Bush. It was devastating to see the recount h...