Worlds Under Construction

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not into AI. I’d like to get that on the record here. (In case you hadn’t noticed that before.) Prosaic machine learning applications can be entirely fine and quite useful. Or, like any tool, used for awful things. The hated, manipulative social media algorithms are regular old machine learning; so are algorithms for […]

The big news I’ve been alluding to is that The Cloak and Its Wizard is getting included in a special Storybundle of books. What makes it special? Well, for one, it’s all SFWA authors, so I’m betting the quality is pretty good. For the uninitiated, SFWA is the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, of […]

I mentioned in a previous post that some aliens I’ve written bear a superficial resemblance to the Eridians from Project Hail Mary. It’s compare and contrast time! I’ll give a general overview of what each is like (Eridian vs Baccarati) and then do some more detailed, specific comparisons. Note also that I’m sticking to the book, rather […]

I’ve encountered everything from the shortest of flash (check out this mastodon account!) to series and epics spanning over a dozen volumes. The same story can be told in a sentence or two (“After the Trojan War, Odysseus traveled the seas for ten years to get home to his family”) or spun into an epic. Which […]

It took me a while to get around to reading Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. I was put off by the descriptions of the initial problem (the sun is dying!) which, sadly, set off my “oh, no, it says it’s hard SF, but isn’t really at all” hackles. It’s actually quite good, so long as you […]