heavyboots

Just Bel doing Bel things. I nearly pulled something laughing at this one, though. 😹

Neal Asher has a new book out called Dark Diamond. The dedication page in it is quite frankly pretty horrifying.

Five years ago, I watched the two Falcon Heavy side boosters come into land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base. Honestly, it was like something in a game animation and seemingly too perfect to be believable. Others, I've seen landing on drone ships with names taken from lain M. Banks' Culture books. Just recently, I saw a huge booster for the Starship come down to be caught between two metal arms - y'know, they caught something the size of a skyscraper like a dropping stick - and that was an astounding feat of engineering. But these are not in isolation, since SpaceX, as of last month, has launched over a hundred rockets in 2024.

Meanwhile, the guy who brought this about, the guy who is aiming to make humanity multi-planetary by putting us on Mars, has a few other projects on the go, like building electric cars, burrowing tunnels under cities, putting up a satellite internet system and, perhaps the most important of them all, preventing the totalitarians of our world from killing free speech.

So thank you, Elon Musk, for bringing to reality, right before my eyes, those things I read and dreamed about as a teenager.

That… is a REALLY unfortunate, given Musk's apparent aspirations to be a Culture-level Bad Guy™. It's like Asher's paid absolutely zero attention to the fact that the Starlink is considered pollution on a massive scale, from an astronomy perspective and numerous environmental aspects. And that Elon's Boring Company is widely acknowledged to have been a ploy to stop Cali from approving light rail projects. And that his purchase of Twitter was in fact a splurge to destroy a free speech platform and bend it to be another disinformation platform instead. Yuck.

I should add that while I personally don't really enjoy Asher's books all that much to begin with, I was utterly unaware of his politics until now. I will strongly recommend against him going forward, much like I do with Orson Scott Card, despite an extreme fondness for some of Card's earlier works.

Do you guys worry much about the politics of the authors you enjoy, or is it more of a me thing?

Stolen from Reddit, with all credit and thanks going to u/dgeiser13 for collecting these.

Best Novelette

• “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha
• “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed
• “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer
• “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in Lake of Souls
• “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou
• “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker

Best Short Story

• “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones
• “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal
• “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo
• “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine
• “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim
• “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim

If you enjoy the works published by these online outlets I highly recommend sharing some of your hard-earned ducats.

Everybody get out there and enjoy! Looks like cooler weather ahead too, so should be a great day for it.

Tuesday was the last recommended day to mail ballots back, so if you mail it now, it might not arrive in time to be counted.

You can drop it at any polling place in the sealed, signed and dated inner ballot envelope. (Outer envelope is not required for this activity.)

Credit to u/SubGothius on Reddit; just cc'ing this info on here for anyone that needs it.