There were a lot of cool things about Barack Obama’s inauguration this week, but this picture by David Bergman rates right up there with the best of the best. Wow. This is what technology is for.
New site design
If you head over to our parent site , you’ll see an entirely new look. The old design had all the dubious charms of something entirely hand-coded by me. The new gt-labs.com is still hand-crafted, but not all by me, meaning it’s no longer built on a foundation of tar-swabbed timber and insulated with sod — think titanium beams and aerogels. (It does have a sod roof, though, since we’re all about being green.)
Thanks to Suzanne Chapman for her design skills, to Paul Sizer and Jane Irwin for moving me in the right direction and suggesting that I meld a blog into it so many moons ago, and to Kat for her troubleshooting and proofreading!
Two-Fisted Science and Dignifying Science going back to press
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
This 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.
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.
