Edward M. Lerner's Blog: SF and Nonsense, page 33

Short stuff

I've largely spent 2015 completing InterstellarNet: Enigma, serializing it, supporting the publisher's launch efforts, and attending the latest Nebula Awards weekend (plus bunches o' personal activities -- all good, just not relevant here). But don't take that emphasis to mean there's no other writing going on ...

Are you done with steampunk? (That's SF re-imagined as though progress ended with Victorian science and technology.) Editors Thomas A. Easton and Judith K. Dial were ... and they put...

And now for something (in fact, many somethings) completely different

I read mostly SF and current science/technology. For a change of pace, I recently pulled off my shelf a thick volume that I had forgotten even owning. It's been years -- at the least -- since I bought it.

But this book was well worth the wait.

Highly recommended
The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, by Daniel J. Boorstin, is as ambitious as the title suggests. Boorstin, if the name isn't familiar, was Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. An historian, edu...

Hugo voting closing soon

Many visitors to SF and Nonsense, not surprisingly, read SF. Some are also, through a membership at last year's or this year's Worldcon, eligible to vote for this year's Hugo awards. If that's you, please note: voting closes on July 31. That's this coming Friday! (Where does the time go?)

The envelope please ...As this year's puppygate controversy continues to swirl, it's more important than ever that nonpartisan readers (as I imagine visitors here to this blog to be) participate in the awards...

Cool stuff other than Pluto

Let me say upfront that the recent New Horizons flyby of Pluto was awesome. But NASA's images speak for themselves; you don't need my two-cents worth on the topic.
When it rains, it poursInstead, today I'll write mostly about some interesting computer (in)security topics. (You also don't need me to tell you how awful the recent OPM hack was, or the ho-hum non-response from the executive branch, so I'll cover less prominent security topics.)
Some in Washington officialdom -- to the level of the...

20 Unbelievable (Really!) Facts About Outer Space

I'm too busy to post this week ... but why should you suffer?

More than meets the eye (or the HST)You won't want to miss "20 Unbelievable Facts About Outer Space."

Happy Pluto Flyby (and Bastille) Day :-)====================== from Edward M. Lerner's "SF and Nonsense"

The curious state of publishing

Some observations about the (generally troublesome) state of publishing ...

Is the shift from print to ebooks hurting publishers? Are brick-and-mortar bookstores dying? Conventional wisdom says yes to both. And (sometimes) conventional wisdom is wrong. See Hugh Howey's "Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong."

(If you're unfamiliar Hugh Howey, he's one of the most successful self-published authors around. He got his start with self-published Kindle books -- although based on that su...

InterstellarNet: Enigma -- now (finally!) -- on paper :-)

It's been an ebook serial. It's been an ebook book (or, as the publisher would have it, an ebook omnibus). It incorporates the Hugo Award-nominated novelette "Championship B'tok." But for the many who prefer the feel of a physical bound volume in their hands? They've been without an option.

Latest and greatestIt is InterstellarNet: Enigma, the third -- and, IMO, most ambitious yet -- adventure in the InterstellarNet saga. And as of today, I'm delighted to report, this novel is, finally, also a...

We will sell no wine before its time

Fine wine -- and even, if you're old enough, the not-so-fine, screw-top beverage the subject-line slogan will evoke -- must age to reach its full potential.

I find the craft of writing to be like that. Sure, I've knocked out the first draft of some short stories in a few consecutive days (or even one!), allowing nothing to interrupt. For longer stories and novels, the process is more complicated -- and not merely because longer stories require (at the least) months to complete.

For longer works...

Physics in flux

With the daily news so often grim, and the 2016 presidential campaign already seeming endless, I find it uplifting, from time to time, to reground myself in less well covered -- but more meaningful and exciting -- dispatches from the frontiers of science. Today: reports and speculations from the frontiers of physics.

A chip off the Moore's Law blockWe'll begin with applied physics. Since the Sixties, we've been on a pell-mell race to continue upping the density (read: continue decreasing the c...

The 2015 Nebula Awards weekend

I'm newly home from Chicago and a wonderful experience: SFWA's annual -- and, as it happened, the 50th -- Nebula Awards weekend. SFWA, of course, is the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. (In this instance, not a typo. When fantasy authors demanded equal billing in the organization's name, maintaining the historical acronym and logo required that odd mixed capitalization.) The Nebulas, awarded annually by SFWA for specific works of fiction, are among the highest honors in the gen...