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Read and enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Mom!

First: the Link.

Second: What is it?

It’s an open call for ‘hint fiction’ submissions.  They define hint fiction as stories of 25 words or less that suggest a larger story.  It’s a pretty cool writing game and starting August 1st (ending August 31th) they are taking up to three submissions via email for an anthology scheduled for next year.  The caveat, you can only send two submissions unless you link to the their submission guide.

Here it is again. Hint Fiction Submission Guidelines!

I don’t have my submissions prepared yet, but I’ve got a few ideas rolling around.  Good fun!

Io9 published (about a month ago, what can I say, I’m working on a backlog), an article on the novels that originated their own science fiction sub genres.  A few are obvious ones (Neuromancer and Cyberpunk, Frankenstein and Gothic Science Fiction.)   Others are a bit more obscure, at least as far as my experience.

As expected the comments are filled with suggestions on alternate books to fill the various categories.  Interesting stuff!

Worth reading is the link to the ‘cranky essay’ looking further in cyberpunk.  (Relinked here.)

Why Authors Have Websites or How I Grew To Love The Web

I happen to be rather lucky.  I’m trying to be an author and I’m already alright at web design.  (This web page is not exactly my best work, but it’ll be getting tweaked soon.)

Websites really are a necessary resource these days.  Authors in particular need a medium to communicate new projects to their audiance.  For authors that stay within certain genres maybe it’s less vital, but any author that has books in a few different sections of the bookstore needs some way of pointing their audiance where to work.

In the case of George RR Martin and Michael Stackpole (the two author’s whose sites I visit the most consistantly) they always have some note on what their doing, what conventions their going to, writing samples, outside projects etc etc.  As a fan it’s fun and informative and kinda cool.  For the author’s it’s building up a brand, just like every other product and service.

Does it become easier or harder to write fantasy/science fiction when new wonders are continually being built for real?

The Rak Jebel Al Jais resort, to belocated in the united arab emarites, looks, from these concept works, like a space colony or perhaps the village of a group of tibetan monks who have been dabbling with some serious technology. (Interesting story idea.) It was design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Desert, the new Metropolist), who seem to specialize in creating larger than life structures. Enjoy!

I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit.  It’s a rather stupid novelty sort of thing, but oddly addictive.  I log in every once in a while and see what everyone up to…140 characters at a time.

I’m not sure how you would go about restoring your twitter, but if the service ever lost the data you can back your twitter up with Tweetake.  It’s a neat little service that pumps out a CSV of all your twitter data…friends,posts, followers, even your profile image url.

I have a hard time with charity. I’m not exactly swimming in bathtubs of golden doubloons; every day that goes to charity is coming out of some other part of the budget. Still, I’m willing to drop some money here and there for worthy causes.

I always wonder though, where does this money go? How much of it actually makes it to the end cause and how much is spent on ‘administrative costs’?  Is the money spent where it can and will actually make a useful contribution or is the charity really just a self-propagating machine, using the money to advertise the problem, in order to attract more money?

Charity Navigatory has answered a few of the questions. For example, the American Cancer Institute has a 3/4 star rating and only 1 star for efficiency. Most of the money gets wrapped up in red tape it seems. Other similar charities such as the Kidney Cancer Association seem to fare much better (although they are significantly smaller.) Charities like the Scripps Research Institute, seem to spend quite a bit more on direct biomedical research.

I’d still prefer to know exactly where the ‘program’ money is used. 99% of the money could be spent for cancer research, but really just be going to a guy who wikipedias ‘cancer’ all day long. That would technically meet the conditions but hardly helps the world. I’m sure that’s not the case for any of these large, well-established charities, but, and you can call me picky, I’d really prefer to know EXACTLY where the money goes. I want to fund research, which means I want the dollar I spent to go to a doctor or a lab tech or a college that is performing actual medical/pharmaceutical tests for treatments or cures. That kind of breakdown seems rather hard to get a hold of.

Ultimately, I prefer more direct forms of charity. Giving to those that I know need it or can I use it. That’s tough to find, but much more fulfilling, for me anyway. This Charity Navigator is pretty great though. If I ever give a donation anywhere, I’ll be doing just a little bit of research first.

After finishing Count Zero last week I jumped into Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson’s third and final novel in that Sprawl trilogy, a science fiction series set in a hypertechnological, paranoid,  corporate dominated, cyber-dystopia that began with Neuromancer.

Mona Lisa Overdrive ended the trilogy and brought to a close, or mostly a close, the story that began with Case and Mollys adventure in Neuromancer.  Molly makes a return and she’s part of this third novel.  I’m reviewing, of course, a novel that’s nearly two decades old.  I’ve quite a bit of catching up to do, but all in all the Sprawl trilogy is the in total probably the best series I’ve ever read.  While none of books match the sheer joy of Neuromancer or capture the near mystical sense of expectation I had reading it, they each shed light on simply a fascinating world that seems, despite all the futuristic technology, to be just around the corner.

Seeing as I wrote out my general criticisms just two days ago with Count Zero I’ll let this stand as is.  Read Neuromancer, at the very least!

Count Zero

I finished Count Zero as part of my read-a-thon.  It’s loosely the sequel to Neuromancer, which I read a few months ago and loved.  This ‘sequel’ is set in the same world and a few years later, but has none of the same characters, although they are obliquely mentioned.  It’d be easy to argue that it’s not a true sequel at all, but it continued one important plot thread was left behind at the end of Neuromancer.  (No I’m not going to give that away.  Everyone should read Neuromancer, not pick it up through a review.)

Count Zero has the same rock solid prose, as fast paced as an old detective novel, but with post-modern (literally) color.  The world is the same paranoid, hyper-technological wasteland as the first.  The characters were not as good as Neuromancer.  They were interesting and had their quirks, but none of them changed all that much.  Even the character that was literally dragged into a new world didn’t experience all that much of an epiphany at his new surroundings and the female lead that was similarly introduced to world very much beyond her seemed to pick up it in her very first chapter.  Still, it was excellent and not just from the writing or the world (which I’m fond of.)  The story kept along the thread that I mentioned before and read in that context you can see a certain devious subtlety that hints at more to come.

If anything, the story just suffered from having a bigger world to work with.  Neuromancer only had the necessity of describing the protagonists’ immediate world.  A sequel, nearly by definition, has to expand the circle, but that means incorporating far more than the story itself requires.  In the cases where it over-reached, the plot came across as too weak.  Where it failed to expand, there was confusion.  It tried hard to fill the void, but sadly, it wasn’t as much of a thrill to follow as in Neuromancer, but well, that was a tough act to follow.

Currently I’m reading Mona Lisa Overdrive.  That’s the third story in the general arc.  I’m hoping it has the same prose, but with a defter touch.  Cheers!