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Came across an interesting post on MetaFilter on Dashiell Hammett and Red Harvest that led me into this thicket hard boiled links: Read the rest of this entry »

Ella Thayer’s Wired Love scans have arrived and the OCRing will begin this weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

A list of various things that I have been up to recently and/or are currently engaged in (in no particular order):

• I started reading Charles Stross’ Halting State and have been enjoying it.
• Turned “The Shaper’s Daughter” over to a friend for copy editing while I work on researching markets.
• Finishing up the new scene to begin “The Alchemist of Liberty”.
• Built a double loft (basically from scratch) for Merideth over the weekend.
• Porting a bunch of my old wiki articles to the new wiki.
• Started watching Torchwood. Three episodes and liking it a lot.
• Researching a PHP based bookmark tool to add to fritzfreiheit.com
• and someone at UofM has developed a new plastic that is as strong as steel and transparent.

It looks like there might be a source for a print copy of Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes that can be OCRed. I’ll keep you updated, but the longer term plan is to submit an eCopy to Project Gutenberg.

Original post on Wired Love.

I ran across an article in physorg.com about orphan stars and this made me think of one of book that I quite enjoyed. So I thought I would go back and find a mini-review (transplanted to the wiki) that I wrote on Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks back in 1993. Here it is:

A profoundly dark book. Banks kept me on the edge of my seat both with his intricate culture and well organized plot. Rather than giving all the pertinent details of the history and character backgrounds he leaves them lying like small mental land mines. As I made my way through ”AADB” I found myself stumbling over these cunningly crafted bits of information and each time I experienced an explosion of implication that would light up the background only to fade away leaving a spectral images of potential. An excellent read.

Karl Schroeder releases Ventus under Creative Commons License.

Seeking Wired Love — or, at least, I am looking for the full text of Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes, a prophetic novel by Ella Cheever Thayer. Published in 1879, Wired Love is not SF, rather it is a novel of two telegraph operators who fall in love over the wire. I first encountered a reference to this book in the Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (which is well worth the read, particularly if you think that Internet age is completely unique) and ever since then I have been looking for copy to read. I have seen copies of it available online through used book sellers, but the price was rather dear, and as much as I would like to own a physical copy of it, I would be quite satisfied with an electronic copy. So if you know where I might find an eCopy or a cheap physical copy (reprint would be cool), I would be grateful.

Update 2007/09/25

Added a wiki page for Wired Love.