G.T. Labs

Jim Ottaviani

Two-Fisted Science and Dignifying Science going back to press

Dignifying ScienceTwo-Fisted Science
Two-Fisted Science and Dignifying Science are close to being sold out in their original, comic book-sized editions. I will reconfigure them to a more…or less, depending on your perspective…conventional trim size of 6×9 in. (15×23 cm) for reprinting this spring, so if you really love the book in the 7×10 in. format, now would be a great time to order them.

(Suspended in Language will probably go back to press at about the same time.)

I’m grateful to all the readers who have made their success possible. Thanks!

Niels loves Tor

On my last birthday I used the ill-gotten gains from my first published science fiction to purchase a robot.

That sounds like the start of an SF story itself, but it’s true. And it’s also true that as a result my cat Niels has joined me as a fan of Tor.

Finally, a terror-free vacuum cleaner!

(Which sounds like the end of an SF short story, so I’ll leave everything in between as an exercise for the reader.)

Reviews — at Chasing Ray

Colleen Mondor, who I first met via Bookslut, asked me to recommend some books I read in 2008 for her site Chasing Ray. Because I apparently have no long-term memory I only talked about books I’d not yet finished. Since writing those incomplete reviews I’ve finished both Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Ghostwritten. Both were excellent all the way through to the last syllable.

(Because you were dying to know: I’m currently still in the middle of A Passion for Mars, along with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Charles Schulz’s Complete Peanuts: 1969-1970.)

Review — Dan Dare #1, by Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine

Dan Dare #1, by Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine
2007, Virgin Comics

VirginGalacticlogo.jpgThis was (is) a good opening chapter to a longer work, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. This review will be short because the one thing that stood out for me above all others is…the back cover.
reserve_your_ticket.jpg
It’s an ad for Virgin Galactic, and it’s snappy and eye-catching and all the things that an ad should be. And the best thing about it? It’s an ad for commercial space flight and it’s real. No corrugated cardboard nuclear submarines or sea monkeys here, which means that the price tag isn’t $1.98 (+ shipping and handling, allow 4-6 weeks for delivery, sold by weight, not volume). So as soon as Kat and I have a spare $400K, we’re going suborbital.

And VG’s logo design is fantastic.

Calvinball

My friend Dave is much smarter than I am, and one of the ways that manifests itself is through him crushing me every time we’ve played chess. (It’s been a while, admittedly, so maybe his skills have slipped and mine have magically improved. I doubt that, but it would probably only take a few minutes to find out. He’d say “Check” and I’d look surprised and we’d both know that all was still as it should be.)

I’m sure there are conventional ways of handicapping the game so that I’d be more competitive, but while reading Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning was the Command Line” this passage triggered an unconventional idea:

So if I had to make [a] wild guess I’d say that they [Be Inc.] are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess.

It’s a great essay, even leaving aside that Be Inc., the maker of a slick operating system much loved by geeks and hackers for its elegance, went out of business about 12 minutes after Stephenson wrote his article. (Not really, but they’re long gone and barely remembered 10 years later.) But the image that one sentence conjured up stuck.

Say we’re playing chess and I’m black and Dave is white. What if I could use my turn to place a black stone on any open square, such that from then on Dave’s pieces could never cross over or through that square? I’m thinking 4 stones would be the most I (or you, or Dave, in the alternate universe where I don’t need the help) could place, since theoretically that’s enough to block any piece but a king or a queen.

Walling off your king would have to be forbidden somehow — maybe by saying that a king can never cross a go stone of either color, or can never be adjacent to one. I don’t know…and have nowhere else to go with this, really. But if you’ve invented a hybrid game that you and your friends enjoy playing, I’d love to hear about it.

calvinball excerpt[And if you don’t know what the title of this post refers to, get yourself a copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson immediately and look at volume 2, pages 268-273, 292, 336, and 429 and volume 3, pages 430-433 and 438.]

Elevator pitch: Diamond’s “Graphic Novel Outreach: A BookShelf Roundtable”

A bunch of prominent graphic novel creators and advocates, and me, were asked to give our so-called elevator pitch as to why we think skeptical parents, teachers, librarians, and other non-true-believers should at least consider encouraging people to…well, at least consider reading graphic novels.

The results are in Diamond’s “Graphic Novel Outreach: A BookShelf Roundtable”, and unlike many times I’m quoted, I don’t have many second thoughts on how I would say it better. It helps that I didn’t have to come up with it in an elevator, of course, but now that I have this thing I hope I get to use it someday. Or even better, that I don’t, and that the conversation goes more along the lines of “Oh, you make graphic novels? I loved the one I just finished. It was about…”