Ken MacLeod's Blog, page 41

Cheerful thought

"Despair is a black leather jacket that everyone looks good in. Hope is a frilly pink dress that exposes your knees."

- Rebecca Solnit, (left) quoted in an article in today's Guardian asking whether the left has missed the open goal offered by the current crisis. An earlier (1932) reflection on the same point has become something of a classic (pdf).

The New Geology

While I was putting together the last-but-one post below I did some searches on relevant terms, and found two copies of George McCready Price's masterpiece The New Geology advertised on AbeBooks. One, still there, was offered for £220.90. The other was £15 from an Oxfam shop in England. I ordered the book and it arrived the following day - well done, Oxfam! It's a beautiful volume: solidly bound, profusely illustrated, clearly and persuasively written. It was long ago demolished with a few taps

De-socialized medicine

Blogging pathologist Ilorien flags up a coup for fellow comments regular George Berger. Dutch-speaking reader(s), go here and scroll down.

Jurassic Ark

Last Friday three hundred or so sceptics visited the Creation Museum, and lots of them have blogged about it. P.Z. Myers has written a slashing takedown, and provided a handy roundup of other reactions, including those of the estimable young blogger Blag Hag. Like most people, these sceptics identify creationism with the outlook promoted by the museum, and for all practical purposes they're right. But it was not always so.

One of the surprises in Ronald L. Numbers' The Creationists, which I've j

What else I've been doing

The Human Genre Project is coming along well. It's just featured in the Madrid online daily Publico.es. Contributions have come in from: SF writers Bruce Sterling, Ted Kosmatka and Ian Watson, young American poets Kelley Swain, Tracey Rosenberg, and Aiko Harman, Brazilian polymath Fabio Fernandez, front-line health workers Heather Fineman and Marilyn Kosmatka, and many more.

A couple of weeks ago I went along to The Golden Hour, the monthly poetry evening at The Forest Cafe, where I heard an elec

Working in the spaceship yards

This evocative cover from the first edition of my novel The Sky Road illustrates hip, groovy SF site io9's list of favourite last lines from SF novels (and yes, that book's last line is one of my favourites, too). Somewhere in the deep background of the notion of a spaceship being built in the centuries-old scars of the oil-rig construction yard at Kishorn was knowing about a sliver of overlap between Scottish SF fandom and the space movement. That intersection still exists. A couple of weekend

Scary stuff

A nearly-quarter-million-word anthology of vampire stories, By Blood We Live, edited by John Joseph Adams, is now available. It includes my short story, 'Undead Again' (originally published in Nature) and undoubtedly many far deeper and darker pleasures than that. I'll be delighted to get my contributor's copy, but if I read it I'll probably be looking between my fingers.

I have a similar half-eye relationship with my copy of Gathering the Bones, an acclaimed anthology of horror fiction in which

Fraternal assistance

My accomplished brother James is again a finalist in the national cartoon contest 'Science Idol', run by the Union of Concerned Scientists, for a place in their 2010 calendar. Take a look and see if you agree with me that James's cartoon (#2) is the best. And even if you don't agree with my totally unbiased opinion, vote!

(If you don't vote you can't complain about the results, you know. You'll have to endure month after month of a calendar above your desk or lab bench or kitchen table with cart

Spreading our Genres

The Human Genre Project has been the the subject of a nice write-up by Jef Akst (who actually went to the trouble of phoning me) in The Scientist, and of an enthusiastic entry in Beyond the Bench, the editors' forum of Current Protocols.

Now they tell us

In last week's (12.07.09) THE ARTS, the review section of that fine Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald, there's a review by Chris Dolan of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God - What Religion Really Means. It's an enthusiastic review. Not having read Armstrong's book, I can't comment on what Dolan has to say about it. But he devotes almost half the review to slagging off Richard Dawkins, whose works I have read, so I'll comment on that.

Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion is, for those caught in t