A number of you will remember Eric Webb from SF fandom and the SCA. I just got e-mail from a friend of mine letting me know that Eric's son had passed along the info that Eric is gravely ill with cancer.

I have contact info for him for his friends who would like to get hold of him. Drop me an e-mail or reply to this message with yours in some format and I'll send you the phone number and e-mail address. From the sound of it, phone is the better path to take.

This may be part of getting older, but I really don't like it. *sigh*

Ok, so I've just finished reading all four books of Lois Bujold's The Sharing Knife series. And having done so, I've concluded that I wasn't actually reading a fantasy series. I was reading an SF series with fantasy trappings.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.
( No real spoilers, but just in case... )

samwinolj, Bonnie, daisy_knotwise, and I went out this afternoon to see Wall-E, leaving Katie and Julie with the young lady who lives next door to babysit. I'm happy to report that the movie was a lot of fun. Definitely sci-fi in the sense that there are plotholes that you can drive a starship through, but if you're willing to sit back and enjoy it for the space opera that it is, you'll have a good time.

I suspect Gretchen will give me leave to add this one to our DVD collection when it comes out. And then Katie will probably be old enough to start appreciating it. :)

I was browsing covers on The Onion's website and tripped across this one which I just liked too much.

By way of Instapundit, a reminiscence about the late Madeleine L'Engle that you'd be unlikely to run across otherwise.

Captain Kirk and company set out for Camelot in this video. Whee!

The new Indiana Jones movie will start filming in 2007 with Harrison Ford as the star.

daisy_knotwise quips, "What are they going to call it? Indiana Jones and the Walker of Doom?"

I went back to work today although I'm still recovering from this weekend's food poisoning episode.

Now, the thing about food poisoning is that it gives you the remarkable opportunity to spend a lot of time on the toilet. For me, this means a chance to catch up on my reading. Thus, in the past few days I've read all of the current comics that had piled up to be read and have annihilated the back issue stack, reading through everything I had of Beyond, The Maze Agency, 1602: New World, Kurt Busiek's Conan, and so on.

It was with some pleasure then that I found that the subscription edition of Heinlein's The Door Into Summer had arrived today, as I needed something to read. Now, this book is one of my favorites and a fast read, so I'm already well into it. And I reached the point where Dan -- in the far-flung year 2000 -- had to take a trip downtown to find a 24-hour branch of his bank so he could get some money.

Of course, in the real far-flung year 2000, he would have gone to an ATM. Could Heinlein have predicted that in 1956? Maybe. He certainly predicted many other things, including AutoCAD, although he called it Drafting Dan.

But he missed totally on the idea of having cash available on nearly every street corner if you had your card with you.

So -- not just Heinlein! -- what are the everyday things that we take for granted that our science-fiction writers of the mid-20th century never would have imagined?

Via Instapundit, it appears that Indiana Jones has been denied tenure.

Hey, we've gotten a review of The Cunning Blood, Jeff Duntemann's first novel that we're releasing at WindyCon this weekend.

Ok, more of the ducks are getting in line. The Cunning Blood is almost sorted out, I need to pack up catalana's album materials to ship off to Canada, and then the current emergencies will be under control.

I'm just waiting for tomorrow's emergency. I wonder what it will be.

Last night, I went down to the studio and copied the ADAT tapes and CDs for catalana's CD project so that I can send them to sexybass and decadent_dave. I should have done this before, but it's been very busy out.

Now, I've got to get all of the ducks in a row so we can get Jeff's novel, The Cunning Blood, off to the printer. By early next week.

Quack! Quack! Quack! AFLAC!

Damned ducks.

Via Steve B., these titles for Klingon fairy tales.

Behind the cut, Uncle Bill explains it all:
( Half Blood Prince spoilers inside )

Click here to see what James Lileks had to say about the finale of Enterprise and the last Star Trek series (for a while, at least).

(It's a good read.)

kevinnickerson pointed me at this one:


:: how jedi are you? ::

Well, it was that or Han Solo...

This is a really large download of a long trailer for Star Wars Episode III.

Sort of. (Ok, so it's fannish. But the production values are excellent. And it's funny besides.)

James Lileks likes Enterprise, as you'll see if you scroll down to the bottom of this entry. As it happens, so do I.

He doesn't much like Best Buy, as you'll see on your way to the bottom. Neither do I.

In an earlier post with reference to job-seeking catalana, I linked to an Instapundit post that spoke of philosophy jobs that were, sadly, only science fiction. Now, the author of the book has weighed in with some data that suggests that some of those jobs may not be quite so fictional...

For catalana, I provide this Instapundit link that points out a useful job market for philosophers.

Sadly, further inspection indicates that it's only science-fiction.

By way of Instapundit, here's a link to the Babes In Space website, which has covers from a lot of the old pulp science-fiction magazines that feature, well, babes...

(I think they may be suffering from an InstaSurge right now, because the downloads are a bit slow.)

alicebentley notes in this post that Greg Ketter won't be in this year's Capricon Dealers' Room. (daisy_knotwise is not running the Capricon Dealers' Room this year and was not involved in this decision and did make sure that the dealers who had been in the room or on last year's mailing list got convention info.) I'm of the opinion that omitting Greg from a dealers' room is a mistake, because he works hard to bring a selection of books that are orthogonal to those that other book dealers bring, so by leaving him out you decrease the degree of diversity in the room.

Having gotten that out of the way and -- as a dealer and conrunner of long standing along with Gretchen -- I thought I'd try writing my thoughts about what the priorities of a dealers' room at an SF convention should be.
( Pontificating inside... )