This is why we can’t have nice things

Epic fail.

Addicts lie: Rob Ford and the future of Toronto

“I’m just so sad,” my mom told me, when she learned Toronto Police Services Chief Bill Blair told reporters he had seen video of the mayor smoking crack cocaine. “It’s just…sad.” It is sad. It’s sad that my partner has to wonder about his mayor screaming in his face and shoving him the way he […]

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Memento mori. (Or, how Worldcon’s youth problem will resolve.)

This year at Ad Astra, I did a panel on Fake Geek Girls. Or rather, their mythical quality. (For future reference, there are about as many Fake Geek Girls in existence in 2013 as there were witches in Salem, MA in 1693.) During the question period, a teenaged girl at the back of the room

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Unpacking the data on women’s submission(s)

I was reading Damien G. Walters’ column on the “invisibility” of women in science fiction, and he brought up Julie Crisp’s explanation for the comparative lack of women publishing science fiction, from an editor’s perspective. Crisp works for Tor’s UK branch, and summed up the lack in this way: You can see that when it

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No, you need not die alone surrounded by manuscripts.

I’ve been turning over a few different articles in my mind. This happens more often than I’m comfortable admitting. I leave the tabs up and open, headlines glaring at me, and I think about the difference between what I feel and what I want to say, and how to fill that gap with meaningful communication.

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Kindle users: here’s a copy of iD just for you.

For some reason, Amazon is holding back copies of iD from its Kindle store. My paranoid, conspiracy-minded brain says they don’t like the content; what vN delivered in violence, iD delivers in sex. (Spoiler alert.) And, Amazon has a shitty record of randomly screwing with their Kindle editions. My editor, however, says it’s a production

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Identity politics: or why demographic sticker shock is no excuse.

I really wasn’t going to write about the election. It’s been covered quite well elsewhere already. I think Dan Hodges’ piece on the subject in The Telegraph nails it: For years the GOP has been sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. And this was the election it finally detonated. The Democrats already went into

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An update, and some thoughts on pessimism.

There are a lot of titles I could have gone with, here. LA Story. LA Confidential. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom. Postcards from the Edge. American Idiot. But nothing I can think of really fits. I’m still stuck in the United States. I’m staying with my former roommate from my Seattle years, and

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The way out is through: on being stranded in America

I just spent the past few days at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, talking about what it means to do science fiction prototyping, and promoting The Tomorrow Project: Imagining the Future and Building It. I’m really proud of my story, “Photographic Memory,” and I’m proud of the panels I did while in San

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“Are you concerned with where science fiction is going?”

I was in the car with a friend on the way to a foresight gig with the advisory council for a major philanthropy broker, and as we waited at a red light he said: “I’ve been meaning to ask you a challenge question for a while.” “Shoot,” I said. “Are you concerned with where science

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