I’ll bet SFWA Vice-president Howard Hendrix is feeling more than a little silly right now. Or perhaps he’s sat at home railing at what he sees as the blind stupidity of his fellow professional writers. Either way, he should have worded that ‘pixel-stained technopeasant’ rant a little more diplomatically - his essential argument had some validity, but the signal got lost in the noise, and the opprobrium generated hasn’t done him any favours whatsoever.

Inadvertantly, though, he’s done a great favour to the genre fiction readership. After Jo Walton declared April 23rd to be International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, the science fiction weberati have come out in force and inundated the intertubes with free fiction for us to read - Andy ‘SFBC’ Wheeler has what appears to be the best roundup for those of us not connected to the web-within-the-web that is Livejournal, though there’s probably a few others floating around: leave links in the comments if you’ve spotted anything that’s worth a mention.

I’ll be bookmarking them all for a rainy day, myself - I have waaaay too many dead-tree books waiting to be read at the moment - but the prospect of being able to read Stross’s Missile Gap after missing out on the Subterranean paper edition is most satisfying.

Your added bonus material comes in the form of a podcasted panel from Penguicon (the open-source software / science fiction convention - why don’t we have one of those here in the UK?) - it features the aforementioned Mr. Stross, John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell talking about the pros and cons of giving away fiction for free as a marketing strategy. Enjoy!

Word filters through slowly to us marginal British blogging types, but I am reliably informed (via the excellent Cosmic Variance) that this is National De-lurking Week over the other side of the pond, and I thought I’d get in on the action.

What’s a lurker, you ask? Well, statistically there’s a 90% chance that you, the person reading this, are one. Lurkers are those who read a blog but never click through and comment. I get maybe a hundred subscribers a day here, and perhaps ten people who actually pipe up with something to say every once in a while.

So, (Inter)national De-lurking Week is designed for you - click on through and say hello. You don’t have to say anything clever or funny - maybe just say where you’re from, or big-up your own blog (if you have one). Get to know one another. Hey, you never know who you might meet! How cool would it be if VCTB brought together a couple destined for a great future together - I’d have an excuse to buy a new hat!*

While we’re doing the dialogue thing, I’d just like to apologise again for the slackness this week. But a new influx of hardware (which is finally all set up and running smoothly) should ensure that no more nasty computer disasters knock me off the straight and steady path of delivering what ever it is that keeps you coming back here. Thanks for your time. Now, take the right hand off the mouse and type something! You can spare thirty seconds, surely? Your boss’s meeting isn’t due to end for another half hour at least …

[* Making an obscure cultural reference to the UK iteration of 'Blind Date' - that's just how cool I am, yo.]

The Russian space organisation Energia has come out with some big news this week. Continue reading “Big plans for future space activity…from the Russians”