…for almost a full minute. I was reading the news today, and was impressed that the Australian government was donating $A1 billion to Indonesia to assist with the tsunami disaster recovery. A good and decent thing, I thought. Then I read on and saw that the Indonesians have to pay half of it back – interest free loans and all of that. I don’t understand. Increasing world debt doesn’t help. If Australia can genuinely afford to give the money, and it can, then it should. Also, this should be a time when Australia shows that it is part of South East Asia and that it is willing to reach out to its global neighbours in a time of need. sigh.

Sean Williams advises that the BBC has compiled a list of 100 things we didn’t know this time last year, which includes the above piece of information and the critical fact that crows, apparently, like the taste of windscreen-wiper blades.

The SFWA has released the Preliminary Nebula Ballot. You can see it here. It’s my understanding that the final Nebula ballot features five nominees in a category, so one nominee a piece needs to be dropped from the novel, novelette, and short story categories. The script category should be the final list, and four novellas need to be dropped.

The Nebula list is a mystery to me, as I suspect it is to most folk, featuring work that appeared between February 2003 and November 2004. I know there are rules, but they seem to be very dumb rules.

That said, as with any awards ballot attracts criticism, so I thought I’d restrict myself to compliments only. Of the works that made the final ballot (and that I’ve read), I thought Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle, and Gene Wolfe’s The Knight were excellent. In the novella category, I really liked William Barton’s “Off on a Starship”, Bradley Denton’s “Sergeant Chip”, Gregory Feeley’s “Arabian Wine”, Vernor Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster”, Walter Jon Williams’ “The Green Leopard Plague”, and Connie Willis’s “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know”. In the novelette category, I thought Christopher Rowe’s “The Voluntary State” was pretty much the story of the year, but also really liked Andy Duncan’s “Zora and the Zombie” and Ellen Klages’s “Basement Magic”. I was perhaps least impressed with the short story category, which seemed to miss a lot of excellent stories from 2003/04. Still, I really liked Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Embracing-The-New”.