(Note:  It says it at the bottom, but just to be clear–this is a post from John, not Kristen.  Blame me.  And thanks to @Katiebabs for the heads up.) So, it looks like there’s another Thing. In a rather condescending guest article on SantaCruz.com, Daniela Hurezanu has come to the conclusion that The End is Nigh, and 20-something female book bloggers are either largely to blame or a primary outcome.  Causality isn’t really clear, but I’m guessing the idea is […]

Today I learned about the Russ Pledge from this week’s SF Signal Mind Meld post, which addressed the importance of it in science fiction today. In case you don’t know what it is, it was proposed by Nicola Griffith and it’s a very simple idea – it simply means making an effort to talk about female writers and their work.  The name comes from Joanna Russ, who wrote the book How to Suppress Women’s Writing.  This has been a hot […]

…and they’re already getting slammed: They should not be followed up and continued. Isaac Asimoc(sic) died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author’s intentions need to be respected here. Ok, I’ll agree there’s logic to that. I’m sure if Asimov had wanted to toss another robot book in there, he would have. It’s not like he had any shortage of opportunity to publish new books, there’s only […]

So, whilst I was off being a good little grad student, apparently there was a Thing in the blogosphere about this fun little rant. By special request of RRRJessica, here’s my take on the subject: He’s got a point. Wait! Stop! Before you fire up the hate mail, I should probably clarify that a bit. There is a valid point in there. It’s a tiny little thing; like most points it is 0-dimensional, lacking depth, width, and breadth, and is […]

Is anyone reading any special books for Halloween this October? I realized what month it was and decided I want to read one or two books that are fitting, but it’s hard to pick those types of books when you’re too much of an easily creeped-out wuss to be much of a horror fan (as a kid, just hearing the spooky Unsolved Mysteries music on TV kept me awake at night – and I saw the movie Aliens on TV […]

A brief technical supplement in support of our proposed new unit, the grrm. The grrm is a unit of change over time. Specifically, it measures the degree of warping of a shelf under a constant weight per distance over a given length of time. In terms of quality, more grrms represent a shelf that bends more under stress. In standardized units, 1 grrm can be described as: 1 degree of deflection under the weight of a full shelf of ASOIAF […]