Happy New Year. In terms of prime factors,
2207 = 3 * 3 * 223. Lots of 2’s and 3’s, which I like.
On Sunday, January 7, 2007, I’ll be live on the radio, from 4 PM to 5 PM in the afternoon, on the Billy Sunshine Show out of Sand City, California (near Monterey), KRXA 540 AM; note that you can listen to the show online using a link on their site. It’s a call-in show, so if you have time on your hands Sunday afternoon, phone in a question.
I got one more story for Flurb #2, the communistic “Revolution Time,” by kibbutznik and young SF phenom, Lavie Tidhar.
On Christmas Eve, the Sunday L. A. Times ran a full-page review of my novel Mathematicians in Love and my story anthology Mad Professor. And the Barnes and Noble SF newsletter lists Mathematicians in Love as one of the top ten novels of the year.
Performing seal that I am, I wrote an answer for John Brockman's annual EDGE question, “What Are You Optimistic About?” I wasn't feeling all that optimistic that day, but I hoaxingly pushed the ideas from my novel Postsingular, and that made me optimistic after all.
I’ve been away from the blog because we were in New York City visiting daughter Georgia, son-in-law Courtney and granddaughter Althea. It was lovely to be with them. It's a little hard to believe I'm now the visiting grandparent category! Sliding down the hill…
It's so great to see the new ones coming up! Althea's favorite present was a second stuffed penguin, a “big peng” to go with her well-worn “little peng.”
When I got home, I got into crunch mode on a short story called “Hormiga Canyon” that I’ve been writing with Bruce Sterling. I think it’s gonna turn out well, and it’s pretty long. According to the official SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America!) categories, it’s not a short story, it’s a novelette:
Short Story — 7,500 words or fewer
Novelette — 7,500 – 17,500 words
Novella — 17,500 – 40,000 words
Novel — 40,000 words or more
I always laugh over that word “novelette,” reminds me of the old Rowan and Martin Laugh-In show and they’d have this foppy, drunk-seeming guy called Big Al pretending to be a newscaster, and he’d introduce some segments of his fake newscast by picking up a little bell and tinkling it and saying, “Featurette!”
Our novelette is about giant ants, something I'd always wanted to write about, ever since the movie Them and the Blondie song, “The Attack of the Giant Ants.”
January 5th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
picked up Hollow Earth and Mathematicians.
I had not read earth, that was fun. i see the movie interest. is that still a possibility?
just getting into Mathematicians, i like.
hayy, new year.
January 8th, 2007 at 9:47 am
We watched THEM the other night on an old movie channel – great idea even if the damn ants are too big to breathe properly. We decided ants about the size of a pit bull would be worse than giant ants – they wouldn’t be staggering with hunger and anoxia like the ones in THEM and would probably be fast and numerous.
The core idea was sound anyway – we should probably be careful with ‘nucular’ radiation. Obliviously, right about at the same time John Wayne was playing Genghis Khan in a movie filmed in a bomb crater. Many of the cast and crew of that film went on to get cancer, but none of them became giants. Too bad; a giant John Wayne would have been a real tourist attraction.
Hope your ants are successful.