I have both of those books!
Barry’s is great of course, but I haven’t read Ferris’ yet. There’s something daunting about it. 
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Writer Nancy Collins has fallen ill and could use some support:
This also posted in Odd Stuff… Feel free to share this if you’re on other social media…
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Roses are red
Onions are smelly
I’m as good a poet
As Percy Bysshe Shelley
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A longer history of Hugo controversies:
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So you’ve probably read half these anyway and it’s still a steal (from Cory’s newsletter)
The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle
It’s been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they’ve teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:
I’ve been associated with EFF even longer than I’ve been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF’s first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink’s local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I’ve benefited immensely from Tor’s editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.
But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, “Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?”
https://craphound.com/down/download/
Just as important - but less visible - was Tor’s willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:
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Reading this right now… what a gut punch of a book…
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The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (formerly of the golden days of io9) is definitely a book that should be recommended to scifi-loving Happy Mutants. The most appropriate subgenre category would be hopepunk due to its overall plot about pushing back against a corporate-led colonization of a planet while much of what’s on display in the book is what a positive community looks like, with open acceptance of different body forms (this is a post-human galaxy, but still with a fight for what constitutes personhood) and sexualities. It’s an incredibly creative work. Not one I want to say too much about because part of the journey is letting Newitz shower you with new ideas. It’s worth picking up.
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Yes… I loved that and their previous book The Future of Another Timeline… wonderful, thoughtful books!
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OMG, what a beautifully written, bleak book that was… Highly recommend, but do be prepared for how very dark it gets.
A talk with the author on Al-Jazeera…
Trying to decide what to read next… between Blood in the Machine or Doppleganger…
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It’d be great to hear what you think of Doppelganger.
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Good to see some surprising old friends there.
Not paywalled.
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It’s great so far (I just started the 3rd part). I like how she’s tying her own personal experiences being confused with Wolf to larger political and economic forces unleashed since the age of social media. I think her analysis of why Wolf went the direct she did is pretty spot on. She is kind of pinning the blame for the complacency on middle/upper middle class liberals, which I think is kind of fair. And she sees Wolf as a shining example of modern liberalism. She was easy to sway, it seems, due to not having any kind of class analysis to her earlier work/thinking. Rather it was all about individualism, and that made it trivially easier to adopt conspiracy theories carried out by powerful individuals (Gates, Fauci, etc).
I always appreciate just how she’s able to pin down larger forces at work, without it seeming like a shadowy conspiracy. That’s difficult to do.
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Thanks, I’ve listened to an interview with her about it that was good, and now I’m all the more interested. Since she said its written more in her own voice, so I’m hoping she does the reading in the audio version.
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It certainly feels more personal of a book… She does a whole chapter on her son (who is on the spectrum) and how the anti-vaxx movement intersects with fears about autism in general.
Let me know if she does do the audiobook.
[ETA] Just finished up Doppleganger… as always, a very thoughtful book by Klein…
Now, onto Blood in the Machine!
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[ETA]
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