Games people play…
Vernor Vinge has a new SF short story, “Synthetic Serendipity”, online at Spectrum Online this month. It’s related to his Hugo Award winner “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, and is pretty good. It deals with vr, gaming, and future shock in an interesting and amusing way. My only concern about it is that the end seems a bit slight. Still, it’s worth checking out.

We cannot control…
…how we will be remembered. That’s something demonstrated by this headline, which is mentioned in the latest issue of Dave Langford’s venerable newszine, Ansible.

A good week for the Locus Awards…
It’s been a good week for the Locus Awards. The latest winners were just announced, and the anthology is now on sale on both sides of the Pacific. I even went out to a local bookstore on Saturday which had an enormous 60-copy face forward display with posters of the book, which was a buzz. On top of that, the Australian publisher has advised that the book is out-of-stock at the warehouse. This isn’t that unusual, as copies can be returned, but it’s a good sign for how the book is doing.

It is, of course, entirely untrue…
…that the only reason I’m going to the Boston WorldCon is to make sure I get a copy of this. I’m sure there must be some other way to get it, but who wants to take a chance, right?

You may need this…
Any number of good things show up regularly in my post office box and email box every week, and one of the coolest lately is a copy of Eileen Gunn’s forthcoming collection, Stable Strategies and Others, which contains a dozen stories (two original to the book) and some fine introductory stuff by William Gibson, Howard Waldrop and others. It’s from the fine folk at Tachyon, who seem to be getting better and better with each passing year, and is well worth chasing down.