Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray.
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
It's our neighbour's cat, for whom hedges are just more stuff to explore.
A reprint of the paperback of The Execution Channel dropped through the letterbox this morning. The first printing came out in April, so that's encouraging.
Also this morning, in the early hours of a better nation (when I, like most of it, was asleep), came the news that the Scottish National Party won Glasgow East. I must admit, I'd have been a little disappointed if it hadn't. This is one of those issues where I'm as undecided as Schrodinger's cat in a hedge. Not independence - the Labour Party. On the one hand, New Labour deserves every bloody-nose defeat it gets. On the other hand, the prospect of a Tory government in Westminster and the SNP winning its independence referendum ...
Saw Nick Carr's article Is Google Making Us Stupid? reprinted in the Indie at the weekend. Gave it a quick skim - claims using the Internet is reducing our attention span, or something. Whatever. But seriously - whenever I see arguments like this, I think of Jo Walton.
JoWalton is a writer who made using the Internet a part of life, and of literature, before most people knew it existed. I think she was the first person to be nominated for a fanwriting award entirely for writing posted to Usenet. She has gone on to write some quite extraordinary SF and fantasy novels.
She has just won the Prometheus Award for her novel Ha'penny, jointly with Harry Turtledove for The Gladiator.
The Execution Channel came third in the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, after In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan and The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon.
John C. Snider has an interview with me up at The SciFiDimensions Podcast, at which you can also find interviews with James Morrow, Cory Doctorow, John C. Wright, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lisa Yaszek, and lots more.
A couple of weeks ago I had to proof-read The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal for the omnibus edition Fractions, forthcoming from Tor (who've just brought out a trade paperback of The Execution Channel, and very good it looks too). Re-reading The Star Fraction in particular was an odd experience: I still like the book, and it stands up well (though not, obviously, as prediction - that world ain't gonna happen), but it takes so much for granted and it still has a little infodump to explain what memes are.
You won't find this one on the business pages, but the rate of exchange of heroin for Kalashnikovs is probably a significant indicator of something. The current rate is one kilogram of heroin for 10 AK-74s or 15 AK-47s.
[I]f you want to know what we [naturalists] believe on almost any subject, you need merely read authoritative works on science and history - which means, first, college-level textbooks of good quality and, second, all the other literature on which their contents are based. The vast bulk of what you find there we believe in.
This is a good tip, quite independently of metaphysical naturalism. Reading the series bible of reality can spare you a lot of continuity glitches, science errors and non-canonical plot developments.