m. c. de marco

Via Night Shade Books: Concept Sci-fi has an interview with Walter Jon Williams up. On cyberpunk, he said:

I’d like to suggest that there were a few key concepts to cyberpunk: the idea that the future would be filled with a tangle of subcultures rather than a single monoculture; the notion that subcultures would adapt technology for their own purposes; that the subcultures would be webbed together by electronic media; and that the future would be saturated by mass media and by messages generated by large corporate entities acting exclusively and without conscience for their own profit and power.

Via a mailing list: the NJJN reports on a new Shakespearean authorship theory: the Dark Lady herself did it!

[John Hudson] gradually devised the latest approach to Shakespearean authorship, the Amelia Bassano Theory — recently recognized by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as one of the top eight authorship theories.

Michael Burstein kindly provides endorsements and information about tomorrow’s election in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Besides the vampires, I loved the use of obscure neurological conditions (such as the titular one) in Peter Watt’s Blindsight. One that stuck with me especially was Cotard’s syndrome, in which one of the female characters believes that she is, in fact, dead. Understandably, she has a hard time convincing the other characters of this fact since, aside from her change in affect, she is very much alive.

Via UniversalHub: Michael Burstein is having a contest for people who preorder his new short story collection. Winners will be Tuckerized at a later date.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away earlier today at 90. See ArthurCClarke.net for links to commentary and more.

Via FireflyFans.net: Steven Brust has braved the lawyers to post his free Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, online. You can find some details in his livejournal or group blog, and a positive review at io9.