Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns free from Tor.com until May 8th!

Update – Free download extended from May1st til May 8th!
Tor has been giving away free eBooks to promote their new website.  The current selection is a great hard-sf navy tale of pirates and sunstealers, the first of the Virga tetralogy.  Tor said:

Virga #1 cover by Stephan Martiniere

Our current free book is Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.”  And Karl added, on his website:

“The first Virga book is a free download from Tor.com

Today Tor Books and I are releasing a free (and DRM-free) ebook version of my novel Sun of Suns.  The only “cost” is that you have to register as a member at Tor’s soon-to-be-launched cool new science fiction portal, located (not coincidentally) at tor.com.”   

 

“Destroyer of Worlds” – 3rd Niven/Lerner book signed!

SPNN (book news/interview)

An interview with Ed Lerner, by Paradox Olbers as SolBelter and David Sooby as Lensman.

*Ed Lerner, co-author of Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds with Larry Niven, announced during a Saturday chat session that he and Larry had a contract, a title [Destroyer of Worlds], and – Pak!  He gave no further details since they haven’t started to write the book yet. 

*Juggler of Worlds, the second half of the Puppeteer duology, has been rescheduled from August to September ‘08 hardcover release in the US by Tor.

When interviewed, Ed had this guesstimate of when DoW might be released. 
<SolBelter> ok EML, “perhaps early 2010, EML ventured”  [after declining to be quoted on a previous phrasing of DoW's completion]
<EML> SB: okay, that’s suitably tentative
<SolBelter> is it fairer to say, EML, that DoW is set against the same backdrop events of 1st 2, or to say third in the series?
<EML> DOW will take place after FOW and JOW. That said, it’ll be standalone.
<SolBelter> [i'm an SPNN reporter for Spindrift, in the SciLands, Second Life]
<Lensman> Ed:  So do I understand you have the title and a contract, but you haven’t yet worked out even the basic plot of DOW yet? [Ed later said yes to David Sooby's question.] Ed corrected us in a followup comment to this post: I appear to have left a slight misimpression. Larry & I haven’t yet done much writing of Destroyer of Worlds, but we *have* worked out the plot and background.
<EML> “Day of the RFIDs” was first published in the antho Future Washington and is in my collection Creative Destruction. You can get the standalone on fictionwise.com.
<EML> “Night of the RFIDs” is just out, in the May Analog [also at fictionwise].
<SolBelter> excellent EML! thank you.

 

Michael Gilbert – Fleet of Worlds rough [from Paradox Olbers collection] 

Antarctic census set to reveal new species: scientists

From the latest issue of Space Daily, this startling headline: Antarctic census set to reveal new species: scientists. Much to my disappointment, the article is about scientists *finding* new species, not themselves being classified *as a new species*.

I had already begun trying to find explanations of how the scientists had evaded being observed before, but I wasn’t happy about the plausibility of *all* of them wearing tuxedoes ….

“The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading” by Howard Gardner

Go to the Washington Post to fill out your free online subscription account and read this opinion piece with Gardner’s view of literacy’s future and the Web.  He says:

“In the past 150 years, each new medium of communication — telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, television, the digital computer, the World Wide Web — has introduced its own peculiar mix of written, spoken and graphic languages and evoked a chaotic chorus of criticism and celebration.

But of the changes in the media landscape over the past few centuries, those featuring digital media are potentially the most far-reaching. Those of us who grew up in the 1950s, at a time when there were just a few computers in the world, could never have anticipated the ubiquity of personal computers (back then, IBM’s Thomas Watson famously declared that there’d be a market for perhaps five computers in the world!). A mere half-century later, more than a billion people can communicate via e-mail, chat rooms and instant messaging; post their views on a blog; play games with millions of others worldwide; create their own works of art or theater and post them on YouTube; join political movements; and even inhabit, buy, sell and organize in a virtual reality called Second Life. No wonder the chattering classes can’t agree about what this all means.

Here’s my take.”

And he has an interestly optimistic long view.

1.933 cms, The Space Eater by David Langford

In the last installment of “memorable“, we discussed a slim-chance number, 1 in 300.  This time, the number is terribly small, 1.933 centimeters – in diameter and you get another phrase as well …

If you go to my “About Paradox and Spike” page, you’ll see my interest in “hard science” sf; so why am I remembering and recommending a story about a “Force zombie killer?”  Because Forceman Ken Jacklin, fighting to keep order in a war-torn London, has died 46 times and has gotten used to dying in combat, although he doesn’t have an interest in anything else any more …

My answer is a pair of phrases.  Jacklin offers to take one of the firsttimers into town at night for recreation.  Of course most of the lights and generators are out or smashed.  “Some places, back alleys especially, we were picking our way just by the nova lights in the sky.”

What remains of the government picks Jacklin to go to the one stellar colony to prevent them from making AP/Anomalous Physics experiments themselves.  To get there, he and the tele(pathic)com officer will go through an AP gate – 1.933 centimeters wide …

The original 1983 Space Eater pb was reprinted in 2004 as The Space Eater, trade paperback and as a Space Eater Kindle edition.  There are plenty of used 1983 pb versions available for the budget-minded.

I’ll be doing a post about Greg Bear’s use of new physics in his novels Moving Mars, Eon, and Anvil of Stars.

Memorable’s next installment will consider a terribly large number – 1.5 times ten-to-the-twelfth.

One in 300 by J.T. McIntosh

This installment of “memorable” has two phrases, actually.  Both are from the same tale of doomsday.

[cover by Ed Valigursky, Ace Books, 1955]

Our sun’s solar output will go up a couple percent soon – time to move!  But how?  Have the great manufacturing centers build lifeships.  One pilot, ten passengers, and enough ships for every “one in three hundred” of Earth’s population to try to fly to Mars.  Madness!  But it helped some of the world to deal with doomsday…  Here’s McIntosh’s opening:

“I ignored the half-human thing that ran at my heels like a dog, crying, “Please! Please! Please!”  …  I was twenty-eight, Lt. Bill Easson, and a more unremarkable young man it would have been difficult to find.  but now through no fault of my own, I was a god.”  Lt Easson is in Simsville, pop. 3261, to secretly pick in 3 weeks the ten people he would try to fly to Mars.  “Lt. Bill Easson, god!”

Galactic Center series – Gregory Benford

I’ve discussed In the Ocean of Night, because of a memorable scene in one of the original stories, and referred to the fact that it became the first of the Galactic Center series and future history 7 years later with the publication of Across the Sea of Suns in 1984.  Then, across the next 10 years, Benford detoured from Nigel Walmsley’s interstellar travels to jump a hundred thousand years into the future near the Galactic Center, not too far from the Eater embedded in the galaxy’s core.  Telling of the remnants of desiccated Snowglade’s Bishop clan, endlessly running the deserts, avoiding the latest mech attempts to kill them, legs pistoning in a 150 kilometer an hour stride, Killeen and his father trying to watch over his son Toby, Benford spun out a trilogy about their own interstellar wanderings.

Finally, in the sixth and culminating volume,  Sailing Bright Eternity, in 1995, he picks up Nigel’s story, pointed to in a indirect reference in one of the Killeen trilogy, to the Taj Majal replica he built after arriving in the Center.  Both sets of characters intersect as the mechs try to keep the galaxy clean of organics, Naughts being of no use to Ones.  The fabric of normal Space-Time twists into multidimensional esty layers at the edge of the core’s black hole as the characters plunge into strangeness and possible safety.

An introduction to Paradoxically

I recently let some friends know about this blog, after I populated it with some posts and pages first.  But then I realized they need some background.

I’ve been involved in the 3D virtual world SecondLife.com since Nov 2006 and my main avatar is Paradox Olbers.   So this blog is for both Paradox about SL [Second Life] and Spike MacPhee about sf and RL [Real Life].  The emphasis in this blog is on aspects of Second Life, space construction as shown and written about in sf and non-fiction, and my reading.   Welcome to my blog!

A second blog is about Second Life, the SciLands, and my island Spindrift, Spindrift Island in Second Life.

Oh, and I have almost half of my sf/fantasy/astronomical art collection uploaded to the Illustration Exchange. Have a look at the other collections at IlluX [Illustration Exchange] – there are 79 collections there, an amazing stockpile of great art by hundreds of artists (not sortable by artist, but you can google the site to pick an artist and sift through thousands of paintings and drawings there.