The Best Related Work category was really weak this year. I voted for Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss. It’s the only one of the nominees that’s truly ambitious, and represents serious effort and thought. It’s not the best How to write book I’ve read, but it’s at least something.
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This year for the first time I’m making a real effort to read all the Hugo nominees. First up: the novels.
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Third Flatiron has published my short story, The Right Books in their summer anthology Master Minds. You can read it on Kindle, DRM-free Pub, or just plain paper.
After 20-some-odd nonfiction books, and probably hundreds of articles, this is my first published work of fiction so I’m pretty psyched about it. More to come!
Monday’s final How I Met Your Mother episode is going to go down in the history books as the best wrapup to a series ever. It shows just what can be accomplished when the show runners really know where they’re going and plan it out in advance. It’s particularly impressive coming off of the worst season of the show ever.
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An idiosyncratic list of the most intriguing, most mind altering, and just plain fun books/movies/games/etc. I read/watched/played in (not necessarily published in) 2013:
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Continuing to think about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I noticed that the Stanford Prison Experiment continues to confuse me. Just what was Quirrell really thinking here? On no level did this make sense. And then I realized that I had neglected one key event in the story. Bellatrix comes to believe that her master is inside Harry. At the time I just assumed without reflection that this was just a necessary part of the plot to free her, but what if it’s more? In fact, what if it was one of the main purposes of the whole breakout? Voldemort is preparing Bellatrix to be ready for the time when he moves from Monroe/Quirrell’s body to Harry’s.
Now if this were any regular fiction, I’d stop there, but consider the author for a moment: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man who does research in artificial intelligence and is fascinated with the idea of AIs and the singularity. Hmmm.
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