22 Aug 2010

New Ultimate SF Workshop!

posted in: science fiction, teaching, writing | 0

[This is an old posting, for historical interest. The workshop is currently on indefinite hiatus.]

Ultimate SF, the annual writing workshop that I lead with Craig Shaw Gardner, will be starting again in October! This is a workshop for serious aspiring SF/F/Horror writers, meeting once a week for ten weeks. For obvious reasons, this is primarily of interest to people in the Boston area. This year, we’ll be moving from our old venue at the Pandemonium bookstore in Cambridge to a location, still to be finalized, in Arlington, one town out on the bus line from Harvard Square. (Pandemonium has become too successful as a gaming center to provide space anymore.)

Get your red-hot info online now at: https://www.starrigger.net/workshop.htm. [Used to be there. Probably in the Wayback Machine, if you care.]

This is an adult-level course, not suited for younger writers. However, young writers looking for guidance can check out my free online course at: https://www.writesf.com.

Come stretch your writing aspirations with us!

21 Aug 2010

Life Sitrep

posted in: personal news | 0

The reason I’ve been silent for a while is that life has been pretty chaotic here, not entirely in a good way—but not all bad, either.  In the last few weeks, life in the Carver household has included:

  • A serious crisis for one of our daughters, which I can’t say much about for privacy reasons, but it involved numerous health-care professionals, many difficult hours, and serious rethinking of educational plans.
  • Hospitalization for a third heart attack for my father-in-law—and much soul-searching over what’s best for this 87-year-old guy whom everyone loves, and who was once full of energy and activity and life. My wife’s in Puerto Rico with him now. I may be heading there soon. Except for:
  • Extensive and risky surgery for a good friend, who had his abdomen opened up and his aorta replaced with a Dacron tube. He lives alone and doesn’t have much of a support system: grown kids who live far away, and a sister who’s here for him, but has some physical disability of her own. That puts me on point for a lot of it. One step at a time, right now trying to get him into a decent rehab place that will take his minimal state-funded health insurance.
  • Less dramatic hospital visits for two other friends, just to keep up the medical theme of the month.
  • The arrival home of our other daughter from North Carolina, in a car that was threatening to kack on her at any moment. She celebrated her return home with a root canal, then almost immediately headed off for the Utah desert with four friends in two other cars of questionable reliability. (“Don’t worry, Dad! We’re packing a spare clutch for each car!”) Thank God one of the chief park rangers out there is my cousin-in-law. (“Please don’t get arrested for drunkenness in the national park. Please.” Not that I thought she would.)
  • The passing of Calvin, my brother’s beloved dog, the world’s one and only shag terrier. We miss you, Calvin!

I’ve probably forgotten a few things. But you get the idea. I’m a little tired. I haven’t been getting a lot of other work done.

For some reason, I really like this quote:

“Microbes are a lot like teenagers. They work on their own time, at their own scale. They do what they want when they want.” —scientist Christopher Reddy, on oil-eating bacteria somewhere in the BP oil plume, who don’t seem to be doing their job

22 Jul 2010

My Library of the Future

posted in: ebooks, quirky, science fiction, technology | 0

I sometimes ponder what I would like my personal library to look like, in my future dream house. Lots of books, of course, and a few easy chairs. Nice woodwork. But a growing part of my library is ebooks, and how do you put ebooks where you can browse the spines, or pull books out at random to look at their covers? One of the things I like to do in my SF collection is to once in a while just look at the covers, and build a kind of gestalt feeling of all those wonderful stories gathered in one place.

So here’s my plan. Along with all those paper books, I’ll have a digital frame displaying a slideshow of the covers for all my ebooks. Understand, that’s a stopgap measure, until the technology catches up with what I really want—a holographic display of the book images, arrayed sort of the way iTunes displays album covers when you’re running a playlist. You’d be able to flip through the display with your fingertips, and if you find one you want to read right then, just pull it out of the holo. Sort of like this display at coverpop.com, only in full-sized full-holo. That action will cause the book to download, if necessary, into whatever magnificent reading device is current then, and open for reading. Sans dust mites.

The best of both worlds.

21 Jul 2010

More Flying Subs

posted in: Flying, quirky, science fiction, technology | 0

I can’t decide whether I’d rather have a flying car or a flying submarine. Both seem right up my alley. Last week’s New Scientist has another article about progress toward a flying sub. (I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find my own post on the subject!) Some of the possibilities being considered: use of jet turbines both for air and underwater propulsion (the underwater use being powered by electric motors, rather than jet combustion), the use of air/hydrofoils for both flight and forced submersion. Of course, the work at this point is being pursued on behalf of the military, but I’m rooting for a civilian version, too. I’d link to the article, but most of it is behind a paywall for subscribers, unfortunately. 

All this puts me in mind of Tom Swift, Jr.’s diving seacopter, from the juvenile novel of 1956. That handy invention used an atomic-powered central rotor in the middle of a flying saucer. To fly, it spun to force air downward. To submerge, it reversed to force water upward. I wonder if the folks at DARPA have given any thought to hiring Tom. Here’s what the Ocean Arrow looked like…

14 Jul 2010

“About:robots” Answers

posted in: quirky, science fiction | 0

Okay, time’s up.  Here are the references in the page you get when you enter “about:robots” into the URL box in Firefox:

  • From the page title (in the top bar):
    Gort!  Klaatu barada nikto!
    From original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Spoken to the robot Gort by Patricia Neal’s character, translated roughly as: “Gort! Don’t destroy the Earth!” or possibly, “Stay your hand!”
  • Robots may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
    Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics.  Somewhat observed by Roombas, not so much by unmanned aerial killer drones.
  • Robots have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
    From the movie Bladerunner.  Spoken by the homicidal Nexus 6 robot shortly before he dies. 
  • Robots are Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Robots have shiny metal posteriors which should not be bitten.
    Bender, from Futurama
  • And they have a plan.
    The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, of course       
  • And finally, the button “Please do not press this button again”
    Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

8 Jul 2010

Mozilla Easter Egg: Zort!

posted in: ebooks, quirky, science fiction | 0

If you have Firefox on a Windows PC, type this into the URL window:

    about:robots

Just that. (It didn’t work on my daughter’s Linux netbook. But it seems to work in Windows and Mac.)

I’ll send a free Chaos Chronicles ebook collection to the first person to identify all six references, plus mine in the title of this post!

Do you know of other Mozilla Easter eggs?

7 Jul 2010

Readercon!

posted in: personal news, science fiction, writing | 0

This weekend, my favorite SF convention takes place in Burlington, Mass. Readercon is a great gathering of writers, editors, artists, and most of all, readers—people who really love to read, think, and talk about books. I’ll be there Friday and Saturday, available for a kaffeklatch on Friday, and signing books Saturday at 3 p.m. If you’re there, please say hello!

7 Jul 2010

Flying Car-a-chute

posted in: Flying, quirky, technology | 0

What better way to start the holiday weekend (or end it, since I forgot to post this after I wrote it) than to see a flying car fly! This I-TEC Maverick Sport Model is different from the Transition and the Switchblade that I’ve written about before. It’s more like a car/ultralight. Drive it like an open jeep, then pop a chute, start up the propeller, and take off in just 250 feet. Awesome. 

Read about it and see the video here.  (Warning–the video starts with a lot of superfluous racing around like a dune buggy, so you might want to fast-forward to the flying part.)

2 Jul 2010

Writing Sitrep

posted in: personal news, Sunborn, trains, work in progress, writing | 0

Promises, promises. I swore I’d keep you informed how work was going on the new book, which in case you’re forgotten is called The Reefs of Time, fifth volume in the Chaos Chronicles. The answer is: slowly, but steadily. Life continues to get in the way sometimes. Especially life with kids and a mortgage. But I’m solving problems with the book one by one (story problems, I mean), and it’s getting there. This time I’m dealing with time travel—yes, in the Chaos universe, which is the same as the Starstream universe introduced in From a Changeling Star and Down the Stream of Stars. The starstream itself comes into play in this book, as well as the center of the galaxy, where the Survivors lurk. It’s my first real foray into time travel, and I’m finding that possibilities and complications pop out of the woodwork every time you turn around.

The really good news is that I realized just this week that I was enjoying working on the book a lot more than I have for quite a while. That’s the best news of all.

Meanwhile, to help pay the bills, I’m working with another author on a nonfiction project (as a paid consultant editor-writer, not as primary author). It’s taking us into some interesting areas of the law—and, as it turns out, the BP oilspill. Eeesh, what a mess!

It’s nice sometimes to retreat to my fictional pan-galactic world. 

2 Jul 2010

Slight Change to the Blog

posted in: blogging, ebooks, personal news | 0

“Engineers! Always changing things!”  So said Dr. McCoy, in the first Star Trek movie.  Generally speaking, you can’t accuse me of doing too much of that with my website or my blog. But if you look to the right (if you’re reading this on the actual blog, and not on Facebook or through a feed), you’ll see one overdue change. That’s right—an ad for my books! I’ve got books in the Kindle store now, and lots of other stores, and it’s high time people knew about it. What a concept. Click through! Give it a try! 

My website has been due for a makeover for, oh, maybe ten years or so. Its appearance is pretty last century. I have lots of ideas (including switching to WordPress, maybe, and merging this blog into it), but little time. Several people have offered to help. But the problem is that it’s a big project that I need to oversee myself, and can’t just hand off to someone. So that’s going to wait a little longer.

I raised the question earlier of whether blogging was a good use of my time. I guess my answer is, I’ll continue to do it as the impulse seizes me, as I always have. So, yeah, you’ll still have this blog to kick around for a while. Think of it as a beat-up old glow-in-the-dark soccer ball. (I sort of like that image.)

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