Oct 15, 2009

This and That, with Extra Ultraman

These are some interesting things I saw today between teaching and working on final revisions on the novelization of Iron Man 2.

In the LA Times' Hero Complex blog, Tim Powers talks about the optioning of On Stranger Tides for use in the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

A biologist has found a way to put small animals in a sort of suspended animation by poisoning them.

If you're in New York City tomorrow, you can go see naked girls reading banned books.

And Japan's recently ex-premier Koizumi has reaped the most excellent benefit a former officeholder could imagine: a prime voiceover role in the next Ultraman movie.

Oct 2, 2009

New Archive for Old Sci Fiction

I saw someone tweeting about this and now cannot remember who, but the upshot is that Sci Fiction, the most excellent online original (and classic reprint) fiction venue edited by the most excellent Ellen Datlow from 2000-2005, is now archived here. This means that you can again find all kinds of outstanding short fiction that has been sadly absent for a while. (Or at least I had a hard time tracking it down.)

Among those stories are two of my own, "Volunteers" and "Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech."

And if that doesn't satisfy your appetite for free online Irvine short fiction, you can find more listed here (although they include neither this story nor this one, perhaps because neither are SF).

Tough Choice

The National Book Foundation wants you to vote on the best work of National Book Award-winning fiction. Quite a slate, with the following authors having made the final ballot:


Only two of the finalists are novels, interestingly, so you're either voting for a career or a single work depending on which author you choose. This would cause a problem for me if I was under any illusion that my vote would make a difference...although I'm still going to vote on the off chance that I win some tix to the NBA banquet.