Science fiction Hugo and Nebula - some early dual winners (novel)

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

The phrase was his own, created to describe to himself what had happened to him. He hadn't used it often, but he'd never had to explain it. They always knew what he meant.

Twice more, unnoticed, she had buried herself in rock, and each time she sensed and knew, and each time when Odeen would explain matters to her, she knew in advance what it was he would explain.

Normally, he never went into so much detail, but these circumstances were scarcely normal. This might be the last gram he would ever send to those he loved. He owed it to them to explain what he was doing.

He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, being that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.

New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.



Have you read any Hugo- or Nebula-winning novels? Do you plan to?

Are you eligible to nominate for the 2012 Hugos? Have a particular book in mind?

Getting back around to the moon ...

 
Last month we shared a few words about the moon (and some pictures of other moons). If you're craving more information about our Earth's moon, check out Moon Zoo.

And here are a few more items having to do with a moon:

Future eclipses of the moon

" ... Imagine it: a moon at your beck and call.”

The moon and the International Space Station

Just at this crisis, as though she comprehended all this agitation regarding herself, the moon shone forth with serene splendor, eclipsing by her intense illumination all the surrounding lights.

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

“I forbid any more mingling with the men from now until the moon’s next rising!”

A crossword puzzle about the moon

I received a little news that way, although I chose not to believe most of it. Assassinated leaders I could accept, but people walking on the Moon?

Moon phases word find

And these guys (as before, turn your volume down LOW!) still really like the moon.

"only in science fiction"

... millions of these planets may circle two stars, astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope announced in a separate finding published online in Nature Wednesday—an arrangement considered so unlikely that until a few months ago it was found only in science fiction.

Only in science fiction movies will you see an exploding stomach.

Are black holes 'doorways' to other parts of the universe?  So far, only in science fiction.

Real-time speech translation — once a vision only in science fiction — will become the norm.

... ambitious technology companies introduced pocket computers, hand-held devices that had previously been seen only in science fiction.

Though I am accustomed to encountering the term “singularity” only in science fiction, I have noticed it popping up in the media more and more.

Scenario forecasting has been a military tool for thousands of years but only in science fiction is the writers' imagination the limit ...

This seems like an impossible idea found only in science fiction ...

Fortunately, only in science fiction stories do humans ever come into direct contact with the vacuum of space, but these contacts are often portrayed as having horrific consequences.

The cyborg can no longer be considered a niche character, present only in science fiction ...

Only in science fiction did speculation continue, principally in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction.

By using science fiction to express his worldview, he makes his point that much more drastically, since only in science fiction is there freedom to produce the amount of imagination required to overcome all of humanity’s problems.

And today? What is "only in science fiction"?

"Georgia on my Mind"

Happy new year!  Georgia on my Mind and Other Places, the collection of stories by Charles Sheffield, is the Phoenix Pick free e-book of the month. The code for the free e-book is in our monthly newsletter. Not signed up yet? Subscribe by clicking here to send us an e-mail.

A few things related in some way to Georgia (the US state) and science fiction:

DragonCon

Science Fiction Lab at Georgia Tech

Hugo-Award-winner William McIntosh

Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup Group

Jack McDevitt lives in Georgia.

Escape Pod podcast (Escape Artists, Inc. in Marietta, GA)

A book published by The University of Georgia Press


And a couple of mentions of said state:

"Dixie Mae had grown up in Southern California, but she’d been born in Georgia–and she was proud of her roots."

“This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They’ve mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer.
“Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking.”