Jim Munroe's marvelous Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gas Mask is now available for free download on his website. If you haven't read it, do. It's free. You've no excuse not to.

Barth notes that the Campbell Award is most likely going to be won by Karin Lowachee, and I tend to agree. The award favors novelists, and Karin is a very good novelist indeed. But that's okay. By all accounts, the Hugo Loser's party is one of the best parties around, and I'll be happy to attend that. Just being on the ballot is pretty awesome, you know?

I got my contract for "Life in Stone" from Lenox Ave. yesterday, which is very quick indeed. I like this magazine more and more!

The Day After Tomorrow is not a good movie. It is cliché-ridden, silly, scientifically ludicrous, predictable, hackneyed, over-earnest, and heavy-handed. But there's some great eyeball kicks in there, some breathtaking visual moments, some utterly gratuitous but enjoyable wolf attacks, and a couple of really funny jokes. I also think it's a true science fiction film (as opposed to a technothriller) because, in the end, the status quo isn't restored -- there's a new ice age happening, and the world will never be the same again. Which in my mind places it a cut above movies like Armageddon or Independence Day, where everything goes back to normal, more or less, at the end. Those are films that lack the courage of their admittedly absurd convictions.

I finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is interesting to read so soon after The Speed of Dark -- both feature autistic narrators who want to be astronauts! Is this a common desire among high-functioning autistics? The books were published in the same year, so I doubt either author read the other and got inspired. It's an interesting book, but with a definite literary mainstream sensibility (by which I mean there's something that resembles a plot, but there's no actual resolution at the end). An enjoyable, fast read, though.