My friend just told me this story. I just had this borderline argument on the phone with someone I recently befriended — who is an older lady — who is a kind of New Agey therapist with numerous clients and who insists, among other things, that she cured herself of cancer without any of the […]
Wanderings
Resources for Science Fiction: Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. – Ray Bradbury
Monthly Archives: November 2008
Knickerbocker Ice Festival
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson, stopping at Nyack, in 1609. Next year is the 400th anniversary celebration and one of the events will be the Ice Show at Rockland Lake. The image at left is from one of last year’s ice sculptures. Knickerbocker Ice Festival One bad thing is that Rockland.org is spamming me. […]
Mask of Chaos, John Jakes
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Before John Jakes was a best selling author of historical fiction he was a trashy pulp magazine story teller. Jakes was into S&S and to my mind the best fantastic adventure writer – after Howard and Leiber. One of his short stories that I read in the 60s in the pages of Fantastic Magazine impressed […]
Nouveau Beaujolais Day
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Each year on the third Thursday of November the Nouveau Beaujolais wine goes on sale. The wine is a "new" wine in that it is not aged. It is the 2008 grapes that have fermented and bottled. The Nouveaus are light, fruity and taste pretty much like grape cool-aid with a touch of alcohol. I […]
Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Amazon is having a novel writing contest. The first prize is a $25,000 contract with Penguin. If you want to enter this you have to have a 50k words novel finished by the first week in February. There is a one week window to submit the novel. This is related to Amazon’s CreateSpace.com POD service. […]
The Star Virus by Barrington J. Bayley
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
This is one half of an Ace Double #78400.It is a later double from 1970 with a John Jakes story on the other side. First off, there is no Star Virus mentioned in the book, so I am going to assume that someone changed the title to make it more sciffy (perhaps Moorcock). Also this […]
The Whole Man by John Brunner
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
John Brunner, with his gritty dark worlds, was the precursor to modern Cyberpunk. His 1975 novel, Shockwave Rider, was required reading when I taught Artificial Intelligence and is considered the first Cyberpunk Novel by some. He was extremely prolific often writing three of four novels a year. The Whole Man is the story of a […]