Edward M. Lerner's Blog: SF and Nonsense, page 46

The poster child for, well, posts

Welcome to the third annual review of popular posts and topics here on SF and Nonsense. The first such round up, Postscript (or is that post post?), continues to run a strong second place in all-time popularity among my posts.

The winner is ...The most popular all-time post? That continues to be, in a cake walk, the October 12, 2010 post Betrayer of Worlds. It's hardly intuitive that the announcement of book four (of five) in the Fleet of Worlds series (with Larry Niven) should be so popular....

Quoth the Gw'oth ...

I won't say nevermore—if only because never encompasses a very long time—but there are no plans for further novels in the Fleet of Worlds series. And so ...

Debut of the Gw'othI invented the Gw’oth for Fleet of Worlds (coauthored with Larry Niven); the little guys returned in three (of the four) sequels. As often happens with species- and world-building, much background is merely hinted at in the eventual story or is omitted entirely. That’s okay. I needed to understand the Gw’oth before putti...

Of hacks and Higgs

The more things change, the more they remain the same ...

What hasn't changed? Chinese hacking of American infrastructure. What has changed is substantiation of something long suspected: that the Chinese government is behind the hacks.

[image error] From the Washington Times, see "Meet China’s super-secret military hacking unit:Chinese hacking team responsible for more than 141 cybersecurity breaches."

The findings come by way of a new report from the Virginia-based Mandiant Corp., which claims its "researc...

Publishing (black and) blues

As a working author, I'm a (tiny!) part of an interesting marketplace -- adjective as per the supposed Chinese curse.

Loosely related eye candyNot the least of that curse/interest lies in the continuing battle of titans over the pricing of ebooks.Viewpoints widely differ.
The pirate's view: Why shouldn't an ebook's price reflect the marginal cost of production (i.e., be free)?  The producer's view: Because, apart from production, there are other costs. That is: payment (one hopes) for the...

No time to go googly-eyed

As a working author, I'm no fan of copyright piracy. (Big surprise there.) But neither am I a fan of commercial organizations judging me. Such as with the forthcoming Copyright Protection System. As in, "ISPs plan to hijack browsers and limit Internet access to combat copyright piracy."

Illicit enrichment facility at FordoComparatively speaking, that's only a small-scale worry. What's more anxiety-producing? For one example, look no further than this interview with Olli Heinonen, a retired de...

Really small (with big implications)

Today's post deals with news of the really tiny.

We'll start at nanoscale -- and that's as big as we'll consider today. (One nanometer, 1 billionth of a meter, is the scale of small molecules. Living cells are no larger than microscale, measured in millionths of meters.)

There's been a fair amount of uncertainty about the health implications of nanoparticles. Why? Much of the allure of nanotech has been that materials often act differently in nanoscale particles than in bulk -- and yet for a lo...

What makes speculative fiction so special?

At every con and book signing, and in every SFnal chat room, it seems that the craft of writing and the business of publishing eventually come up. There's a sort of symmetry in play: most writers are inveterate readers, and many readers aspire to be authors.

So: I'm delighted to be returning to WriterHouse to reprise my weekend seminar on writing speculative fiction. The seminar (updated, of course since I last taught it) will be held Saturday and Sunday, April 13-14, in lovely Charlottesvill...

Beyond eclectic

Strange place, this world. Stranger yet, the internet. And so, from once again bulging (virtually speaking) files ...

We'll start with "Did Neanderthals and modern man really co-exist?" And if they did, was there, well, fraternizing? According to one recent study, "Theories about when the last Neanderthals walked the Earth may have to be revised, according to a study that suggests they became extinct in their last refuge in Spain much earlier than previously thought, from 35,000 years ago to n...

Hacked off

Time and again I believe that I've posted for the last time on the topic of Internet insecurity, that there is nothing more to be said on the subject ... only to have events show me otherwise. So what's gone wrong recently?

The hacking of Bush family email accounts at AOL likely didn't entail any great technical skill. What shocked me is how news outlets considered excerpts from the Bush family's email archives to be fair game.

Yes, the family includes two former presidents -- but not everythin...

Spacing out -- in a good way

So what's new in space exploration?

To begin, a new lunar exploration company. As Ars Technica reports, "Golden Spike wants to start human lunar expeditions within a decade." Though Golden Spike hasn't revealed much in the way of plans, it has a serious list of backers, including Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance. (ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin.) Golden Spike's board of directors includes NASA veterans and notable VCs.

Maybe there's a reason for NASA to ask...