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I finished the last audiobook of novels eligible for Hugo Award nominations year. That got me thinking about the other novels I’m currently reading, none of which I’m particularly loving. I think I’m going to drop all three. Katabasis by R. F. Kuang is eligible for the Hugo this year. I wanted to like it. […]
This is my second year participating in the Hugo Award. I am not attending the Worldcon (LAcon V in Los Angeles), but I have purchased a World Science Fiction Society membership again this year, and I have been reading eligible novels all year. So far, I have read 17 eligible novels, and I’m hoping to […]
It has been almost ten years since I visited* the Grand Canyon. I dispersed camped in the Kaibab National Forest surrounding the park. There was a subtle alkaline acrid smell everywhere in the area. I never figured out if it was from the stone and soil or some vegetation. I can’t say it was exactly […]
In July, my server at home died. It was a very old FreeBSD system with a Pentium 4 CPU, half a gig of RAM, and the last CRT in the house. I had been using it mainly as a file server. I spun up a VM on my cloud provider, restored a few critical files […]
It turned out to be a vampire novel. Look, lots of people like vampire novels, so when you’re writing the blurb for yours, you should probably use the word “vampire” at least once, and maybe not the word “genre-defying”. There’s no reason to trick the rest of us. One of the early chapters, the one […]
The Jefferson Barracks Bridge carries Interstate 255 across the Mississippi River between south St. Louis County and Illinois. Of all the major bridges in the St. Louis area, this is one of the few remaining that does not carry bike or pedestrian traffic. The area definitely needs a bike crossing here. On the Missouri side, […]
I wanted to like Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. I had quite enjoyed Six Wakes by the same author, and I generally like stories set on space stations. This one had a chic young woman on the cover. Instead, the protagonist is a perpetually complaining brat who doesn’t seem competent to take care of herself, […]
I don’t go to “cons,” but I am going to the Worldcon this year, the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society. I don’t even know why, exactly. One of the features of a con is the opportunity to meet celebrities, but I can’t say that I’m particularly excited about that. My interest in […]
“Those #@%! Nazis!” I switched off my neural news feed in disgust.My young granddaughter turned her hover chair around to face me. “Grandpa, what’s a Nazi?”The question caught me completely off guard. What is the AI teaching these children? I started to formulate a response in my head, about racism, populism, nationalism, and millions of […]
An often overlooked feature of the Star Trek universe, starting particularly with Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the socialist economy. The words “socialism” and “communism” are never used, and the stories are rarely about economic systems, so most members of the audience have failed to catch on, even with the contrast of the hyper-capitalist […]
