On my last birthday I used the ill-gotten gains from my first published science fiction to purchase a robot.

That sounds like the start of an SF story itself, but it's true. And it's also true that as a result my cat Niels has joined me as a fan of Tor.

Finally, a terror-free vacuum cleaner!

(Which sounds like the end of an SF short story, so I'll leave everything in between as an exercise for the reader.)

Colleen Mondor, who I first met via Bookslut, asked me to recommend some books I read in 2008 for her site Chasing Ray. Because I apparently have no long-term memory I only talked about books I'd not yet finished. Since writing those incomplete reviews I've finished both Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Ghostwritten. Both were excellent all the way through to the last syllable.

(Because you were dying to know: I'm currently still in the middle of A Passion for Mars, along with J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Charles Schulz's Complete Peanuts: 1969-1970.)

Dan Dare #1, by Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine
2007, Virgin Comics

This was (is) a good opening chapter to a longer work, but I don't have a lot to say about it. This review will be short because the one thing that stood out for me above all others is...the back cover.

It's an ad for Virgin Galactic, and it's snappy and eye-catching and all the things that an ad should be. And the best thing about it? It's an ad for commercial space flight and it's real. No corrugated cardboard nuclear submarines or sea monkeys here, which means that the price tag isn't $1.98 (+ shipping and handling, allow 4-6 weeks for delivery, sold by weight, not volume). So as soon as Kat and I have a spare $400K, we're going suborbital.

And VG's logo design is fantastic.

My friend Dave is much smarter than I am, and one of the ways that manifests itself is through him crushing me every time we've played chess. (It's been a while, admittedly, so maybe his skills have slipped and mine have magically improved. I doubt that, but it would probably only take a few minutes to find out. He'd say "Check" and I'd look surprised and we'd both know that all was still as it should be.)

I'm sure there are conventional ways of handicapping the game so that I'd be more competitive, but while reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" this passage triggered an unconventional idea:

So if I had to make [a] wild guess I'd say that they [Be Inc.] are playing Go while Microsoft is playing chess.

It's a great essay, even leaving aside that Be Inc., the maker of a slick operating system much loved by geeks and hackers for its elegance, went out of business about 12 minutes after Stephenson wrote his article. (Not really, but they're long gone and barely remembered 10 years later.) But the image that one sentence conjured up stuck.

Say we're playing chess and I'm black and Dave is white. What if I could use my turn to place a black stone on any open square, such that from then on Dave's pieces could never cross over or through that square? I'm thinking 4 stones would be the most I (or you, or Dave, in the alternate universe where I don't need the help) could place, since theoretically that's enough to block any piece but a king or a queen.

Walling off your king would have to be forbidden somehow -- maybe by saying that a king can never cross a go stone of either color, or can never be adjacent to one. I don't know...and have nowhere else to go with this, really. But if you've invented a hybrid game that you and your friends enjoy playing, I'd love to hear about it.

[And if you don't know what the title of this post refers to, get yourself a copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson immediately and look at volume 2, pages 268-273, 292, 336, and 429 and volume 3, pages 430-433 and 438.]

A bunch of prominent graphic novel creators and advocates, and me, were asked to give our so-called elevator pitch as to why we think skeptical parents, teachers, librarians, and other non-true-believers should at least consider encouraging people to...well, at least consider reading graphic novels.

The results are in Diamond's "Graphic Novel Outreach: A BookShelf Roundtable", and unlike many times I'm quoted, I don't have many second thoughts on how I would say it better. It helps that I didn't have to come up with it in an elevator, of course, but now that I have this thing I hope I get to use it someday. Or even better, that I don't, and that the conversation goes more along the lines of "Oh, you make graphic novels? I loved the one I just finished. It was about..."

...the first touch-tone telephone was introduced. When I get frustrated with this modern world, I can usually make myself smile by imagining what text messaging would be like using a rotary dial.



It's obvious that as I grow older I become more easily amused.

I'm not featured on the cover of the new issue of Danny Fingeroth's Write Now! -- they put Christian Bale's picture on it instead. Probably because they wanted people to buy copies. But you will find something by me tucked away inside, lurking amidst articles by Denny O'Neil, Max Allan Collins, Brian Michael Bendis, and other luminaries. My piece talks about writing non-fiction comics, of course, and it includes a flowchart, because that's how I think about writing sometimes.

(No kidding -- I finally broke through a mental logjam regarding the plot of an upcoming book when I started approaching it as computer code. Jason Shiga would be proud.)

Updated, Nov. 14: Because of a production mixup, in the printed article it appears as if neither I nor the Write Now! editors did the appropriate research on how to spell "research." The irony isn't lost on us, we regret the error, and assure you that we do know how to use a dikshunairy. Here's the flowchart, as we intended it to appear.

Sean Bieri and I just finished the first Better Zombies Through Physics story, and with the Blessings of Tor (sounds like something Rick Moranis might have said in Ghostbusters, but it's much better than that) we are sending Erwin and Co. out into the wild via a Creative Commons "Attribution-Share Alike" license. You can read more about it over at Tor.com.

Here's hoping some many of you will have some fun with the characters!

From New Scientist, this article about what we're likely to see from the Obama administration. Also, this video, called "Blueprint for Change: Technology," which appears to be an edited version of the Candidates@Google event held November 14, 2007.

The latter is long, and less about science and technology than I would like, but these election maps created by Mark Newman won't take you much time to digest. I found them very heartening -- the great divide is not so great when looked at in these ways.

I think this will be my last post on the election -- see, I found this patch that helps ease the cravings for presidential/political news...it will probably work until at least mid-January. In the meantime, I'll just stick to reading The Onion. (Warning: As the movie ratings people say, they use language in their reporting.)

I heard two excellent speeches last night. John McCain's was very different in tone and content from what I heard in the last few months (and I think the election would have been much closer had it been that version of McCain we saw and heard all along). Barack Obama's was very much a continuation of the tone and content that helped convince me to support him last December.

I think we elected the right person to lead us. President-elect Obama has at least 8 years of bad road to repair, so I hope he got a good night's sleep.