From Forbidden Planet, news about Big Head Press and Scott Bieser’s latest project. Interesting take on a well-worn and well-known tale.
Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 35)
Breaking with tradition, the Libertarian Futurist Society yesterday announced the winners of the 2008 Prometheus Award for best novel published in 2007, as well as the classic fiction award (what used to be called the Hall of Fame). None of the five finalists consider themselves libertarian, from what I understand, but the LFS judges and voters (I am one of the latter) found enough pro-liberty content in the novels to declare one, no wait, two books the winner. Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny and Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator tied for the award, which is a first in LFS history. The awards will be presented at the 2008 WorldCon in Denver. At the moment the time for the presentation has been set for 14:30 on Wednesday August 6th. I am in Colorado that week (mostly in Colorado Springs) and plan to be there in the audience that day.
As far as my own votes, I placed Jo Walton first, followed tightly by Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel. I think I had Turtledove’s book third or fourth, as I found his writing style somewhat simplistic, even for a juvie.
The classic fiction award went to Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange. I have seen the movie, but not yet read the book, so I did not place it on my ballot. I have been trying to find the book in used book stores around town, but so far no luck.
It appears this feature dropped in my transition to Blogger’s new layout settings, or fumbled the transition somehow. I think this now should work once more.
I don’t own an iPhone.I think it’s a neat device, though over-priced for my modest needs at the moment in terms of cellular communication. Still, I saw Shazaam! in action last week, and that might be enough to make me buy one of those sexy critters. This app allows you to pick up the names of songs being played, just by pointing the phone for a few seconds at the audio. Worked fine in my car, but the background noise at Chipotle drowned out the same attempt there. Maybe that’s just a cute toy affect, but it didn’t help that 70% of people I was around at the conference last week had iPhones. Peer pressure…
I just returned from a week long developer conference in Phoenix, Arizona. I hesitate to state what type of development, as multiple areas were covered. I returned quite exhausted from lack of sleep, but feel rejuvenated and inspired. Many ideas are competing for time in my head at the moment, and I think the next few months will be quite busy. I am going to try to juggle editing Prometheus, this sparse site, and a myriad other projects.
It appears that the Worldcon time slot for the 2008 Prometheus Awards has been moved to Wednesday August 6th (the first day of the convention), at 2:30 pm. More details to follow.
I will be in Colorado that week with the family, and plan to attend the Prometheus Award presentation. This will be my first WorldCon in 10 years. Whew! Time flies.
I’ve never been happy with the look and feel limitations of this site, but rarely do I have much time to attempt any changes. While I fiddle around with a few things this site may resemble the fate of the terminator T-1000 from second Terminator movie. I may even change the title as I have found this to be somewhat limiting of late.
Eighty-five issues.
Twenty-six years – December 1982 through April 2008 and counting…
4 Megabytes.
A couple of weeks ago I placed my trusty scanner back into its drawer, after completing phase one of a project that has taken countless hours over the past two months, namely scanning in as text every single copy of the past issues of Prometheus, the newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society.
In the end, probably no one cares but myself. Still, since finishing the work of scanning every issue, I have slowly been cleaning up the OCR text, and taking many a walk down memory lane. In other words, little time for web surfing or blogging.
I have no idea when I’ll finish this project, but one day I’ll end up with a fully searchable repository of all the past issue of Prometheus, at least via spotlight on my Mac.
The latest unearthing of Heinlein material heads to the printer over at Subterranean Press. I’m not being cynical, really, as this looks like an interesting collection.
Subterranean Press does a great job producing quality books at decent prices, and I’m delighted to see that one of the authors they are carrying is Jack Vance. Now, if only they had printed the new Michael Shea collection, and made the price less staggering than the one produced by Millipede Press…
It’s been quiet here lately, as I’ve been trying to finish the latest print issue of Prometheus, the newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society. The quarterly publication schedule for the newsletter aims to have it in readers’ hands around the middle of January, April, July, and October. Looks like I should nearly be able to meet this goal with the current issue.
