The end of May is traditionally the time when we Sidewise Judges have to go through and release our nominations cut of short stories and novels for the award - which means that dreadful dozen stories that you haven't gotten to that look like prime stinkers are mandatory reads - along with the other stuff that 'life its ownself' have caused to be ( Read more... )

My brains fry sometimes when people run the same plot / setting over and over again and call it Fresh! New! Alternate History when it’s Done To Freaking Death.  Like, say the American Civil War, or World War II - or in more recent times, taking sub-sub-genres (steampunk, undead stuff, dragons and fantasy stuff) and proclaiming THAT as Alternate ( Read more... )

I was watching an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode tonight about a boxer on his way down who charms a little boy, who enthusiastically uses his ‘big wish’ power that he goes on about during the earlier part of the show to change the result of the fight; instead of the boxer getting flattened and dropped much further down the list, he wins and looks like a ( Read more... )

…said Abraham Lincoln.

Amidst the tons of Sidewise reading and whatnot, I’m also reading Paul Riddell’s Greasing the Pan. Since it’s all basically essays and all of the material is reprints from deceased magazines and the like, it’s not like you HAVE to read it all in one sitting.  It would make good bathroom reading material, except when Paul ( Read more... )

Sometimes, you end up with a movie or book or story that you just get stuck on - as in, you’re at page 138, and the early part of the book is good, but the author has just gone off on a tear with some weird artsy material that passes all rational understanding, and you just put the darn thing down and you don’t pick it up again for a while.

Other ( Read more... )

A new meme, it has a nice beat and you can dance to it.  Write down the stuff on your Kindle (after the cut is mine) including samples and newspapers/magazines.  BOLD the stuff you’ve read all the way through, italicize the stuff you’re working on.  Here goes:
( Read the rest of this entry » )

The tax program choked and died on me on install; had to clean everything out and reinstall.  Had to also dig up our old tax files for the program, so that it could pull forward old information for multi-year stuff affecting our taxes, and those had gotten stuck away somewhere and were more of a bear to find than I figured.

I’m reviewing a friend’s ( Read more... )

The thing is definitely very useful, and I love it in a lot of ways. I have around six pages of Things To Read on it, and I’ve bought a small handful of books.

Bought:

• Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation by Daniel Gross
• Escape from Hell by Larry Niven
• 
  Rolling Thunder by John Varley
• 
  The Return of Depression ( Read more... )

Philip Jose Farmer dies in Peoria at the age of 91. And yes, the first for-sure memory of adult SF I have is Riders of the Purple Wage in Dangerous Visions, from my mom’s copy in or around 1967.  And no, I still haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake or pretty much any other James Joyce.

• There’s now a monument in Iraq to the shoe-throwing seen round the world.
• Paul Krugman is a fan of Charles Stross, which makes sense to me.   I’ll just wait for Krubman’s first AH novel…
• How many ways can you force-stuff the Roman Empire into science-fiction?  At least a dozen.