So, "The Island" got a Hugo nom. Which means I'm supposed to pimp it, which is fine because it's been far too long since I swapped out the fiction on this page anyway. So here you go, with a couple of embedded illustrations by Dan Ghiordanescu and Chris Butler.

A bit of background. "The Island" is a standalone novelette. It is also one episode in a projected series of connected tales (a lá Stross's Accellerando or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles) that start about a hundred years from now and extends unto the very end of time. And in some parallel universe where I not only get a foothold into the gaming industry but actually keep one, it is a mission level for what would be, in my opinion, an extremely kick-ass computer game.

For the time being, though, it's just a story — stretched out across the screen below, or packaged neatly as a pdf under "Short Stories", above, to take with you and eat on the fly. It's also available in Sony Reader and epub formats, thanks to the efforts of a fellow I know only as "Mike". Update: Apparently that e-pub file may not work on all readers — it doesn't work properly with Stanza on the iPhone, anyway — but this file, courtesy of one Fergus Heywood, does. So I'm told. Although I myself don't have an iPhone.

However you take it, I hope you find it to your taste.

There was nothing else even remotely interesting at Blockbuster — so we rented ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Well, after all,  I often talk about Ayn Rand and her passionate followers, who have effectively taken over the U.S. Libertarian movement, influencing much of the rhetoric we hear from the American Right… though none of the policies have ever been actually enacted during Republican rule. I’ve published both scholarly papers and popular articles about Rand’s fiction and philosophy.

So, I thought, why not give her acolytes one more shot at selling me on her biggest, most-central tale? An honest person does that. Whereupon, with a sigh, but opening my ears and mind, I slid the disk into the player….

Enough about Star Wars fanboys. The Jedi Council is adjourned until there's something new to bitch about. I'm here to talk about a rarer specimen: the Jurassic Park fanboy. We — yup, we — are out there. We have a tender-verging-on-deranged love for Steven Spielberg's dinosaur epic, which is just out on Blu-ray.

On Monday night, MIT’s largest lecture hall filled with the hum of a capacity crowd, creaking with anticipation in their wooden chairs. People young and old jockeyed for seats; the unlucky were left to stand in the aisles. As more people filtered in, the hum morphed into a buzz — until a man with wild white hair, wearing a shirt the colors of sherbet, took the stage, commanding, “Take your seats, please.”