The Immortal Eileen Gunn

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Here's a picture from Worldcon, of Eileen Gunn showing off her newest award -- Pour Le Merite, informally known as the Blue Max. It was the Kingdom of Prussia's highest military honor, and I presented it to Eileen for courage in the face of . . . well, me.

Did I mention that we recently sold "Zeppelin City" to Tor.com? It'll be posted sometime in September, I think, and it's a barn-burner of a story. It's got Zeppelins, slidewalks, a spunky girl inventor named Radio Jones, an ornithopter pilot named Amelia Spindizzy, and giant naked brains in glass jars. You don't get much more science-fictiony than that.

Eileen likes to claim that we worked on it for fourteen years. She exaggerates by something like a decade. But I do seem to recall that the science was cutting-edge when we began.

Speaking (as we weren't) of bookstores . . .

Saturday, I went to Balwin's Book Barn, out in Wyeth country in Chester County. The Book Barn is that most sensible of institutions, a barn filled with used books, which you are permitted to buy.

The only quibble I have with BBB is that it's run by people who know books, so the chances of my ever finding a first edition of The Hobbit priced at five bucks is pretty much nil. But after I'd gone through their (relatively small) science fiction section, I chanced upon two hardcovers of my own books -- Jack Faust and Bones of the Earth, I think, but I could be wrong. Both were pretty reasonably priced at eight dollars a pop, and both were shelved in the Modern Fiction section. So I whipped out my pen, autographed them, and put them back on the shelf.

Now, whoever is sensible enough to buy them, can get a particularly nice deal.

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