Some links:

>> A Song of Fire and Ice video game rights optioned This sounds like a game franchise that might interest me. Even though franchise games (Star Wars, LotR) games in my experience are seldom great games.

>> Release day for Jay Lake: Green hits the shelves today.

>> Japanese weird: Cyber Figure Alice on sale now. In a must-see link for Idoru (W. Gibson) fans, this is a virtual girl/pet that you can carry around in your pocket. I need to look at it some more to figure out how it works, but the video is kind of interesting.

After the long period of inactivity I plan to get back on track with my blogging service - and here's some more stuff to keep my visitors surf-satisfied:

Jay Lake is back in Cancerland and writes about with his usual openhearted candor >> I really feel for him and hope he gets better soon. He writes wonderful short stories and cool novels, is a blogging voice I have come to rely on, and has worked so hard this year to drive off the Fear that this is just utter unfairness exemplified. But there it is.

British SF author Ian Sales lists his personal SF Film Top 50 in response to Time Out's flawed list >> His list includes many of my own favorites and hints at some interesting films I will have to dig up. And yes, Blade Runner, Alien and Metropolis are on his list...

From the Guide to Literary Agents blog, a list of the top 10 things that make a Literary Agent *stop* reading your manuscript. They're the obvious things, really, but it's nice to have them all together. Useful for framing purposes. That blog entry should come with a downloadable picture frame and wall-mounting instructions.

Bad Astronomy has a post on science coverage by the media, science education (all in the USA) and how it relates to the sorry state of scientific understanding displayed by many citizens. The research and articles cover the US situation only, but I'm afraid it applies to much of Western Europe as well; although perhaps just a little less so.

The post links to an study (PDF here) that illustrates just how bad the situation is. Some striking things that popped up: in many media outlets, pseudo-science hogwash gets the same attention as real science (e.g. in evolution vs intelligent design series, or in the many "docufiction" series produced by Hollywood for news channels). Not surprising that people start believing idiotic theories if they hear about them on tv every day.

The discussion on Bad Astronomy was sparked by the terrible results of a national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences (phone survey of 1,000 people in December 2008). The lowdown:

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.


• Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.


• Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water. (the survey allowed answers between 65-75% as okay)


• Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Quite stunning to see this. 41% of Americans think humans and dinosaurs coexisted? Oh my.

As I noted above, I would think, or hope rather, that the situation here in Belgium is better. Then again, on second thoughts, it might not be. We don't get pelted with conservative Christian ID propaganda, and science is not considered as "evil" or "anti-religious" by most of our religious tendencies. On the other hand, evolution is vehemently disavowed by our large Muslim minority, and recent debates on evolution have shown that that is likely to become a problem in the future.

I can only try to stimulate my own kids to question their environment, to probe it in an inquisitive and rational manner. So far that seems to be working quite well, as evidenced by my four-year-old's constant questions that I find myself almost unable to answer... How is steel made? How does electricity work? What am I made of? Why is electricity dangerous? Where do the photos go once we've printed them, are they in the computer still?
And so on. Challenging, for sure, but also good fun trying to come up with answers that are understandable at his age, but not too "bad science-ish".

Via - I first got this off Jay Lake's link salad.

Some general netleechery:

>>Kepler mission launched successfully.
The Kepler mission will go hunting for exoplanets - planets in other solar systems close (in astronomical terms) to our own.
Why care? Kepler's instruments should allow it to detect tiny planets - Earth-scale - and with the recent flood of exoplanet discoveries, the general expectation is that quite a number of these will be found. Who knows, there might be one or two with just the right combination of orbit distance (temperature), atmosphere, surface composition, to more or less match our own preferred environment. That would be cool, wouldn't it? All we would need would be transport...

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>> And talking about transport, there's been some debate following Charlie Stross' predictions about space colonization not being a realistic scenario, because of the many inhibitive factors (cost to lift sufficient mass outside of the earth's gravity well being the main one). Some people keep coming back to "Orion project"-style propulsion as the solution to all these problems.
Sorry, but I for one am not convinced the rapid detonation of nuclear bombs is the great way forward. Rocket launches - even using conventional technology that has been around for over sixty years - go wrong at an astonishing rate. Is it two out of every ten launches that fail? I'm not sure I got that statistic right, but anyway, rockets keep malfunctioning under the extreme conditions that arise when you shoot something out of the atmosphere. And call me a coward, but I'd rather not see a vehicle carrying enough fuel for millions of nuclear explosions blow up in the night sky.

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>> Why do Killer Asteriods Fascinate Us So?
To continue on the spacey theme, Discover Magazine (via Jay Lake's link salad) has a story on why asteroids fascinate our collective conscience. I know it is something that worries even my four-and-a-half year old son; it's been something he keeps asking from time ever since learning about the asteroid impact as a possible extinction event for the dinosaurs. From that perspective, I don't think it has anything to do with cultural predilections, but everything with an innate fear of the unpredictable, the unpreventable, "divine intervention"-style events that no one can do anything about.
And who can blame us?

So, some yummy links from the interwebs:

Charles Stross gives us the lowdown on the coming century in his FAQ >> Highly interesting questions are answered in a very straightforward manner. I almost completely concur with Charles' analysis of our near future...

Jay Lake's new novel Escapement is released to the masses in paperback.

"Lively and thought-provoking...Lake effectively anneals steampunk with geo-mechanical magic in an allegorical matrix of empire building and Victorian natural science." --"Publishers Weekly" (starred review) on "Escapement"

I really liked Mainspring, so I'll have to go for Escapement as well. Besides, Jay seems like a great guy judging from his blogodentity; so go out and shop!

Jed Hartman reports on the flood of submissions they're seeing at Strange Horizons >> Is this symptomatic of the collapse of a number of other fiction markets? Is this because they are one of the few "pro" markets who accept electronic submissions, which makes them much more accessible for the novice writer?