[From Cat Sparks:] Ever read a short story by Paul Haines? Chances are that afterwards you needed a strong drink, strong cup of coffee, or a long shower. Paul is well known in the Australian and New Zealand speculative fiction community for writing the creepy stuff, the scary shit, the story that makes you [...]

The Hugo winners are out. There will always be disagreements about the relative merits of awards and their nominees, but I don’t think anyone can complain that the winners (Chabon, Willis, Chiang, Bear, Hartwell, Gelder, Moffat, Martiniere, Prucher, Scalzi, Goldman & Vaughn, Foster, LOCUS, and File 770) don’t represent the highest level of achievement. It [...]

Just through the email from Jonathan Strahan, it seems that Melbourne has won the 2010 Worldcon bid and that Shaun Tan will be Artistic GoH. Congratulations to everyone on the committee. Here’s the bid’s website. It’s going to be a great convention.

Some time recently Talking Squid took its millionth hit. I missed the exact day (today we’re on 1,130,616 with 106,892 unique hits). This means that Talking Squid has probably had two orders of magnitude more readers than all my stories put together. (Sigh.)

Thomas Disch died by his own hand on July 4. He will probably be remembered for Camp Concentration, a complex and disturbing novel about enhancing human intelligence, the short-story “The Brave Little Toaster”, and his critical review The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. This is not the sum of the man; he won awards [...]

Justice Antonin Scalia, the religious revanchist appointed by George Bush as part of his pandering to the evangelist right, gave a speech to Orthodox Jews earlier this year in which he supported his bigotry with a steady stream of lies. All quotes in italics are from the story in New York Sun.
Lie the First: [...]

Earlier this week I watched The Bedford Incident for the first time. It’s a fantastic cold war suspense movie starring Richard Widmark. And I got to thinking, has Widmark died? So I Googled him and it turns out he has indeed died. Just over a week ago [actually: it was late March, not May as [...]

From Nature, via ABC News in Science, details of a placoderm fish fossil from WA’s Gogo site that pushes the  “known record of live birth back by about 200 million years“.
Kudos to my friend John Long, my alma mater and current employer UWA, and to David Attenborough, after whom the fish has been named.

Bruce Dorminey reports in COSMOS on a fascinating paper that suggests the early Earth may have had three moons, only for the orbits of the two smaller (~100km or so) moons to become unstable over a billion years or so. The paper by Jack Lissauer and John Chambers is an excellent example of the sort [...]

This year’s Ditmars were handed out in Perth on Sunday evening. The results have been posted on ASif! There are years, in a community the size of Australia’s, when the competition is, shall we say, not as fierce as it could be (no years or names shall be expressly identified*). Not this year. Every winner [...]