Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

Nicely said "Obrałem ziemniaka" (I have peeled a potato). Very talented indeed.


Nic się nie zmieniło od czasów inż. Mamonia

April started yesterday and  the day was full of news that have filled me with glee.

Tor.com has an excerpt from John Scalzi first foray into fantasy. It is from the first book of his new fantasy trilogy The Dead City and it is called The Shadow War of the Night Dragons. I had to check the title couple of times to write it mind just freezes on this one. And it's nothing compared to the first sentence. It's dark. Really dark. And stormy. And there are vampires and werewolves. And of course dragons. Night dragons. And now I want more. So many questions. Are night dragons real after all? Which legends about them are real? How dark was that night really? As one commenter said "Why isn't book 2 out already?" Good thing Scalzi is under a contract to write this.

Scalzi was also busy as the president of SFWA protecting sf authors copyrights which have been execively violated by everyone from individuals, large companies, several sovereign governments to god(s). The current disaster in Japan has been last straw and the limits of tolerance have been reached. No longer can science and nature parrot science fiction. Not without a lawsuit at least.

Charles Stross has announced that his blog Charlie's Diary has been acquired by Cheezburger. He and many readers welcomed their new LOLcats overlords but not everyone took to the news so gladly. Scalzi wasn't happy and neither was Ghlaghghee. The bacterial colony formerly known as Peter Watts declined to comment.

This lack of response from the Peter Watts may be because he is busy working on a new shared universe anthology with Paolo Bacigalupi. Null Earth: World of Pain and Sorrow is a shared world set in a far future when aliens called Null have conquered Earth and all humans are living tragic an meaningless lives. The authors goal for this project is to fight the unreasonable optimism of other shared universe anthologies as they think science fiction is ready for a pessimistic future of bleak, uncompromising wretchedness. The first story by Ted Chiang is endorsed by Watts as "the saddest thing I've ever read in my life", which coming from a man living in the horrifying reality of his books is a true praise (If you happen to be eating dinner right now you may also want to look at his healing leg. Somehow I find it more gross then when it was eaten out). I literally laughed out loud when I read he expects suicides and Nebula.

The first book in the series, Weeping, Despair, and Death, is tentatively due out in the second half of 2012, pending their editor's return from medical leave for acute depression.

But a shared universe with stories by Watts, Bacigalupi and Chiang sounds like the most awesome thing ever. Now, I really want this to happen.

In other news Shawn Tan, after winning an Oscar and more financially gratifying Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, has been signed to ABC's Dancing with the Stars. And New York Time gave up on its "Most Read" titles list, based on data compiled from e-book readers after seeing the results. And

And last here is something you can actually buy:

See the latest installment of Mr Deity show. This time - the true origin of life on Earth (and it turns out the banana thing is true after all). Same result - no work. And we can all blame PZ for evolution. Or just the fact that Mr Deity was too lazy. Good that Lucy takes care of details otherwise nothing would work at all.


The scary thing is that this is exactly how I imagine God from the stories about him which makes me think that if there is an afterlife it looks like that. And since as an atheist I'm going to hell anyway it's good that I at least believe in Lucy's ability to run things. The only sensible person out there.