Science fiction versus sports? Strange comparison.

I just came across a bizarre article at TechRepublic.com that claims “sports is a better form of entertainment than science fiction.” Now if that’s not one of the strangest cases of comparing apple to oranges I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is. So you’re a sports fan, and you want to demonstrate [...]

Around the sf blogosphere 10/29/08

Let’s see what’s going on at other sf sites and blogs.
SFSignal’s latest Mind Meld asks, “Is science fiction responsible for the lack of public interest in space exploration?” The question comes up, of course, because of astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s cranky assertion of just such a relationship between the two. By far the best [...]

Zeroing in on Vulcan

Over at Discover magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog, there’s an article about the discovery by astronomers that one of our closest stellar neighbors, Epsilon Eridani (10.5 light years away) has a solar system somewhat like our own, with rocky inner planets, outer gas giants, and two asteroid belts.
This is good news, insofar as numerous science [...]

Vinge offers a vivid look at the near future

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (2006) is subtitled “a novel with one foot in the future,” but that seems a little too modest; to me it feels like the novel takes a daring leap into our near future and lands solidly with both feet. This is a story brimming with technological concepts, all combining [...]

Butler’s Ark of doom

I’m a little bit frustrated right now, because I just read Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler, and only after finishing it did I realize it was part of a series (the Patternmaster series), with several other books preceding it. And I hate reading books out of sequence, even when it doesn’t really matter to [...]

All About Books — one of those meme thingies

OK, I’ve never done one of these things before, but what the hell…… I don’t have anything else in the posting pipeline right now, so let’s do it.
This one’s called “All About Books” and I picked it up from Shannon at Books Worth Reading; she, in turn, got it from another site, and that person [...]