Marginalia
Jun. 15th, 2004 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentGenius, or at least it is if you have my job: "What Blues Music and Healthcare Marketing have in common", complete with half-a-dozen gen-u-wine blues tracks with titles like 'Hoodoo This Marketing Plan' and (my personal favourite) 'Ain't Got No Data', which can all be downloaded here. That's what I call creative advertising.
The Picture of Everything is just damn cool. The Geneva Convention is a nice idea, but clearly they're missing the obvious guest of honour. ;-)
Slightly out of date now, but still interesting, is the Guardian's survey, carried out at the Hay festival, to determine a top 50 essential contemporary reads. I've read two: His Dark Materials and Slaugherhouse 5. I should feel ashamed, I know, but to be honest from the whole list there probably aren't more than fifteen in which I'm particularly interested.
More recently, this weekend just gone, there was a piece in the Times by Stephen Baxter, on a familiar theme, to which I am sympathetic: the role of science fiction in acclimatising us to change. Matthew Cheney writes about it more objectively here.
And finally, in the post today was a copy of Ian R Macleod's short story collection Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, from which I promptly re-read 'New Light on the Drake Equation', the story through which I first fell in love with this author. It's as remarkable as it ever was, and more fully about the spirit, the quality, of the future than almost any other story I can call to mind. Perhaps it's not exactly what Baxter had in mind when writing his piece for the Times, but it's still about what the future will be, what it won't be, what it should be, and what it can't be. It's a fierce story, and a sad one, and beautiful and bittersweet and...and look, it's still online at SCIFICTION, so go, please, and read it, and save yourself from my prattling on.
The Picture of Everything is just damn cool. The Geneva Convention is a nice idea, but clearly they're missing the obvious guest of honour. ;-)
Slightly out of date now, but still interesting, is the Guardian's survey, carried out at the Hay festival, to determine a top 50 essential contemporary reads. I've read two: His Dark Materials and Slaugherhouse 5. I should feel ashamed, I know, but to be honest from the whole list there probably aren't more than fifteen in which I'm particularly interested.
More recently, this weekend just gone, there was a piece in the Times by Stephen Baxter, on a familiar theme, to which I am sympathetic: the role of science fiction in acclimatising us to change. Matthew Cheney writes about it more objectively here.
And finally, in the post today was a copy of Ian R Macleod's short story collection Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, from which I promptly re-read 'New Light on the Drake Equation', the story through which I first fell in love with this author. It's as remarkable as it ever was, and more fully about the spirit, the quality, of the future than almost any other story I can call to mind. Perhaps it's not exactly what Baxter had in mind when writing his piece for the Times, but it's still about what the future will be, what it won't be, what it should be, and what it can't be. It's a fierce story, and a sad one, and beautiful and bittersweet and...and look, it's still online at SCIFICTION, so go, please, and read it, and save yourself from my prattling on.
