This summer, Aaron and I are going to Reno with Kim for the World Science Fiction Convention aka WorldCon. This means that I get to vote for the Hugos, so I'm making it a mission to actually read everything that was nominated. These are my notes.

Best Short Story

• "Amaryllis" by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010): Dystopic world in which ( Read more... )

I had a lovely weekend that was as mellow as last weekend was hectic. Saturday, we slept in, and I spent all day lounging on the couch, reading a book. Then we met Laura, Marietta, and Mark for dinner at McMenamins on Broadway and had dinner and conversation, followed by the new Star Trek movie at Lloyd. It was just as good the second time... and ( Read more... )

Q: Why do you want to go around the world?
A: Because you can’t go through it.

--Kelly Link

This is an amazing article by Nalo Hopkinson on the issue of race in science fiction and fantasy. It makes me really, really wish I was going to WisCon this year where this topic will definitly be discussed.
There’s a thing that often happens at some point when I’m being interviewed about my writing. The interviewer, whatever part of the world or ( Read more... )

We skipped the green beer and went to the Bagdad to see The Black Hole. 1979, Baby! I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and that was on television... about all I remember of it was the main characters running across the bridge while the huge red fireball came rolling at them. Wow... the movie is soooo sweet on the big screen. The models are ( Read more... )

From Making Light:What is it with the zombie stories?

Vampires are evil in sexy and interesting ways, so of course people keep writing stories about them. Aliens allow us to play with, well, alienation, the concept of the Other, and the eternal question of who, really, is the weirdo in any given situation? But zombies, they just lurch around and ( Read more... )

The Bagdad has been showing the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica every Friday for the past five weeks. This is the first time I've actually gone... turns out this otherwise bleak, depressing (but excellent) season is much funnier with beer and a full theater of crazy Portland fans. We got there an hour before BG started, and even then had to ( Read more... )

Coraline is amazing. Complete, spectacular eye candy set in charming spooky story. It was so much fun to watch that if it hadn't been completely sold out at Lloyd Center on Friday night, I would have been tempted to buy another ticket and see it again immediately. I can't remember the last movie that I've felt that way about. It's not Shrek, and if ( Read more... )

"Having articulated my most solid, important memory, I find the memory now feels different. It has lost its texture, somehow. Previously, that memory did not exist in the form of words saying "I think," or "I that." There were the textures of feeling--from a wild, wild wanting to the coldest and emptiest despair. There was the smell of the chemical ( Read more... )

Majel Barrett Roddenberry has died of leukemia at the age of 76. Star Trek fans would know her as Nurse Chapel of TOS, Lwaxana Troi of TNG, and the voice of the computer in every Star Trek series and movie, including the upcoming one ( Read more... )