Birds of Prey

Steam sans punk

We interrupt this blog for a TV movie listing

Forbidden Planet is on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 8:00 EDT.

The genre is listed as "Horror."          Horrors!

Of Rhysling Awards past

As you've likely heard by now, this year's Rhysling Award winners have been announced. Congratulations to Megan Arkenberg ("The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages") and Shira Lipkin ("The Library, After").

Looking back at past years' winners:

2010, Long: Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson, "In the Astronaut Asylum"
2010, Short: Ann K. Schwader, "To Theia"
2009, Long: Geoffrey A. Landis, "Search"
2009, Short: Amal El-Mohtar, "Song for an Ancient City"(includes audio)
2008, Long: Catherynne M. Valente, "The Seven Devils of Central California"
2008, Short: F.J. Bergmann, "Eating Light"
2007, Long: Mike Allen, "The Journey to Kailash"
2006, Short: Mike Allen, "The Strip Search"
2005, Long: Tim Pratt, "Soul Searching"
2005, Short: Greg Beatty, "No Ruined Lunar City" (audio)
2004, Long: Theodora Goss, "Octavia Is Lost in the Hall of Masks" (includes video)

Robert A. Heinlein - birthday quiz

Robert A. Heinlein was born on 07/07/07. Here are some passages from 7 of his works ... can you figure out where each one comes from?

Your choices are:

• Orphans of the Sky
• Sixth Column
• The Puppet Masters
• The Man Who Sold the Moon
• Starship Troopers
• Glory Road
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Ready?

1. A mile and eight-tenths— A little closer than I liked, especially without company. The inner egg had reached steady speed, no more help to be gained by staying inside it, and its skin temperature indicated that it would not open automatically for a while yet—so I flipped a switch with my other thumb and got rid of it.
2. Not as sound—it was a white noise, a roar in all frequencies, sonic, subsonic, supersonic, so incredibly loaded with energy that it struck him in the chest. He heard it with his teeth and with his bones as well as with his ears. He crouched his knees, bracing against it.
3. Backed down fast and out of there, blind-dogging both hatches, then blind-dogged every pressure door on way back. Told Mum, then told her to put one of the boys on back door with a laser gun—here, take this one.
4. My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.
5. That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or many miles. He had never experienced an unbroken height greater than that between two decks, nor an open space larger than the village common. He was panic-stricken, scared out of his wits, the more so in that he did not know what it was he feared. But the ghost of long-forgotten jungle ancestors possessed him and chilled his stomach with the basic primitive fear of falling.
6. He dropped into a light sleep and dreamed that he was flopping around on the end of the longest lever conceivable, a useless lever, for it rested on nothing. Part of the time he was Archimedes, and part of the time Archimedes stood beside him, jeering and leering at him with a strongly Asiatic countenance.
7. On the other hand, would a skilled cowhand have destroyed a well-trained work horse in favor of an untried, strange mount? That may be why I was hidden and saved—or perhaps I don't know what I am talking about; what does a bee know about Beethoven?

some science fiction stuff (and some not)

Too hot to be outside?  Stay cool indoors and check out these SF- and reading-related items:

The Turkey City Lexicon - a Primer for SF Workshops.

"This lexicon is not a guide to scholarship. The Workshop Lexicon is a guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers, the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write and sell professional genre material. It’s rough, rollicking, rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the table."

 The io9 Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy for this month.

This month's issue of Clarkesworld Magazine.

From the Wall Street Journal: "Your E-Book Is Reading You."

Blade Runner animation.

And, for no particular reason, here's a small fountain in Washington, DC:

Science fiction author birthday

Science fiction author Jody Lynn Nye was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 5, 1957.

Here are a few Nye-related items:

An interview from 2011
A reading at Tuesday Funk
Her bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Nye on e-publishing
A bibliography with book covers
Excerpted chapters from Waking in Dreamland
       (Book 1 of Dreamland series)

Have you read any of her works?

Not science fiction

(Did you click on the picture?)

Read a bit more about bald cardinals here.