Pebbles in the Sky

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Isaac Newton once famously said, "I do not know what I may appear to the world.  But to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

We still remain mired in ignorance.  But there's no getting around the fact that there have been a lot of very pretty pebbles discovered in the last thirty years.

Check 'em out:

A lot of these discoveries were driven by a NASA-led cooperative international program to discover all potential extinction-event bodies in the Solar System and map their orbits to determine whether we need to be worried.  This is a subject I could go on about at great length.  (Short version:  We appear to be safer than we thought.  And we need to be very very worried.)  But I shan't.

Enjoy.


And on the World Fantasy Awards shortlist . . .

My pals and occasional publishers Jacob and Rina Weisman at Tachyon Publications are up for the "Special Awards -- Professional" category.  To which I can only say:  Whoop!  Whoop!  Whoop!

My pal Ellen Datlow is too.  She probably hasn't gotten a lot of congratulations because everybody assumes she's already won ten of everything.  But forget all that "just" to be nominated nonsense.  It's a big deal to get on one of those lists.  Some very good people have long and productive careers without making it there once.  So this shout-out is for Ellen:  Whoop!  Whoop!  Whoop!

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