ORIGINS give-away: My friend Mikaela is doing an Old Races: ORIGINS give-away over on her blog! Go check it out!

Disneyland for Deon: Years ago Ted and I said to our friend Emily, “Get a teaching job and move to Alaska!” What we really meant was “Get a teaching job and move to Anchorage!” except Emily took it more broadly and got a teaching job in Kotlik, which is on the west coast of Alaska and is approximately 500 miles from Anchorage. We told ourselves to be more careful about our phrasing in the future, and then we left Alaska for Ireland, leaving Emily behind.

She’s still there, and is at the moment running a crowdfunding project for her adopted Yup’ik brother, Deon. Deon was born with glass bones, and this October will have outlived his doctors’ estimations of his life expectation by ten years. He very much wants to go to Disneyland to celebrate his birthday. It’s an expensive proposition, so the only way to make it happen is, essentially, through the kindness of strangers. And Emily doesn’t know this, but I will eventually be writing a story for the people who help send Deon to Disneyland, so g’wan, donate a bit, make a kid happy, get a story! And boost the signal, please!

Recent reads: 2013: I’ve finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, which in some ways I liked a lot and in others found a little frustrating. Mostly I didn’t feel Swan’s voice was much differentiated from previous KSR protagonists, though the other two major POV characters were reasonably different. I liked the development of the romance and the world, I liked many of the choices the characters made, I just sort of felt like I could switch Frank out for Swan and it wouldn’t be significantly different.

The other problem I had with it is sort of…philosophical. It’s sort of “he didn’t write the book I wanted him to!”, though that’s not exactly accurate either, because I like what and how KSR does. But like the Science in the Capitol trilogy, which is some of my favorite writing ever, 2312 isn’t an enormously accessible book. I mean, I’m okay with that because I like hard SF and I’m willing to put the time in, but … I think the climate change theme that’s so central to these books is hugely, hugely important, and I think he realizes it brilliantly, and I want everyone to read it and understand what he’s seeing in our world that develops into his fiction, but…this is SF for SF lovers, not for casual readers. I still desperately want that gap bridged, and KSR writes so beautifully I want him to be able to do it, but he doesn’t. And I don’t think it’s even his goal, so I recognize that my frustrations are ill placed here, but…damn. I do so want that accessible, world-changing climate change SF story to be *out there*.