For those unfamiliar, Clarion West is an intensive six-week residential workshop for aspiring and neopro science fiction writers, held in Seattle. I went in 2001, as one of seventeen students learning from Octavia Butler, Bradley Denton, Nalo Hopkinson, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack. Here are some things I learned, in no particular order: […]
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As you may know, Connie Willis will be named an SFWA Grand Master at Nebula Awards weekend this May. She joins a long, distinguished list of recipients going back to the first honoree, Robert Heinlein, in 1975. (Sorry for the link to La Wik, but the link from Google’s search results to SFWA’s page of
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Via Virginia Postrel, an op/ed piece by Bob Bruegmann has some thoughts on driverless cars’ impact on urban life. Since sf colors how I think, I found the lack of thought-through details disappointing. The main take-away is “driverless cars wouldn’t necessarily lead to more sprawl,” which suggests to me the piece is intended to lodge
There’s a car I often see in the parking garage with a sticker honoring a family member, a soldier killed in Afghanistan over a year ago. I don’t know the owner of the car. I certainly never met SSG Jesse Ainsworth, KIA on 10 July 2010. But every time I see that reminder of
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Now that we know religious sentiments will be the only rationale for space settlement, how can we expect space settling to unfold and what will space settlements look like? Here are some initial thoughts. 1. Space settlements will be founded by colossally wealthy individuals As we discussed previously, the costs of space settlement will be
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In the first two installments of this series, we discovered: Using foreseeable technology, it would be too expensive to go to space, stay there, find or make valuable things, and send those things to Earth. Any technology that would lower those expenses would lower the cost of finding or making those same things on Earth,
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January is a good time to remind you of my novels and stories that saw their first English-language publication in 2011 and are award-eligible in 2012. Short stories “Nine Views of Transco Tower, by Iak/Sohu” (post-alien-takeover sf) “Mike Fink Goes to Big Bend” (sfnal retelling of American and Mexican folklore) Novelette “Selling Short” (solar system
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Previously, I talked about why space settlement, using current technology, would cost too much to ever happen. But what if the costs were to drop enough, through nanotechnology or some comparable magic wand? Simple: the price of goods sold by space settlements would be too low to pay back even those new, low costs. Why?
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As a longtime sf fan, one of the toughest realizations I ever came to is that Space settlements will never happen for economic reasons. In part, the costs of getting to space are too high. Charles Stross has discussed the costs at great length here. To get one person to the Moon, bringing along the
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I want to thank whomever bought a copy of “Selling Short” from the Kindle store sometime November 3-4, 2011. I’ve never been more proud to earn $0.35. Comment here or drop me a line at raymund – at – raymundeich – dot – com.
My first epub sale Read More »
