Second paragraph of third chapter:"You're a big girl," she told the scalding hot waterfall as it gushed into the tub. "Big girls don't get bent out of shape by little things," she told herself. Like losing her job. "Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they're at school, putting the baby up for adoption, ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:They left the conference center in a Tesla with blacked-out windows, then drove her for half an hour through the trackless, officezoned industrial yards of Seattle. Their destination was an anonymous warehouse with a loading dock and a windowless door. There was nothing to distinguish it from hundreds of others ( Read more... )

(Accidentally posted in draft form yesterday - this is the real thing.)

Second paragraph of third chapter:"Good afternoon, honourable students."
When I first read this the year it was a Hugo finalist (2010), I wrote:didn't really grab me I'm afraid. It is a tale of time police and overlapping universes and histories, broken up by some reflections ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:I'm a mathematician with an interest in higher-dimensional topological deformations, and a recent career track that includes designing visualization systems for directed exploration of stochastic market movements with application to the Black-Scholes model-a weaponized banker, in other words. I have zero training ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He's forty-three and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with him like his own personal storm cloud. "I was very busy all the time," he says with a self-deprecating little shrug. "I didn't have time to pay attention to myself. One orbit, it only ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third story ("Extracts from the Club Diary"): It being the case that our Club is a secret body, admittance to the membership of which is by invitation only -- and then to the most close-lipped and trustworthy of fellows -- I feel it incumbent upon me to start a journal of our activities. Accordingly, I declare this Club Diary to ( Read more... )

The first of this year's Hugo nominees which I got after nominations had been announced. It's set in the same universe as Saturn's Children but that really doesn't matter, as it's a very different book - unusually for SF (though much less unusually for Stross) one of the central themes is future economics, specifically the issue of currency and ( Read more... )

Well, I had a tremendous time at Eastercon. The unprecedented fact that it had sold all available memberships beforehand boded well; and the hard work put in by the team paid off in almost every way.

( panels )

Having now read all of the novels on the shortlist for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award, I am glad to say that I finished on a high note. Rule 34 ticked a lot of my boxes, dealing with the relationships between small state-like entities (in this case, a near-future Scotland and a fictional Central Asian republic) and also with the relationships ( Read more... )

Here are my votes for the Best Novelette category, in reverse order ( Read more... )