But will there be a John W. Campbell, Jr. cameo?

Remember how I once said given enough time everyone ends up at Tor and/or Baen?

Weird Tales' loss is tor.com's gain:

[We’re] pleased to add Ann VanderMeer as a consulting fiction editor for Tor.com.

Ripped from context meets selective quotation

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/08/29/venus-before-mars-the-case-for-real-time-telerobotics-from-venus-orbit/ “This was the heyday when we were going to go everywhere and do everything,” said planetary scientist Wendell Mendell, the Assistant Director for Exploration in the Science Directorate at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

OK, tinned apes sent on doomed missions [1] past another world, nil. Robotic explorers to every planet and a number of lesser bodies, actually pretty good.


1: The singularly pointless Venus flyby would have coincided with a major solar flare. Whoopsie. The way Apollo handled flares was to hope they didn't happen.

Wow, Spinrad is coming up a lot lately

Until just now, I never noticed Bug Jack Baron and I Will Fear No Evil have sort of similar technology driving the plots. The difference is in the Spinrad commandeering body parts from the poor is bad and in the Heinlein it's good or at least tolerable.

I for one find it really interesting that the body of an attractive person the billionaire had daily contact with, a body he might well covet, suddenly became available just when the billionaire had a use for it.

Analog editor to retire

Influential editor Stan Schmidt announced his retirement from Analog today.

Gosh