Us and Them

I'm not going to dwell on the The Big Paris-Hilton Scale moment that's been all over the science blogs for the past day or two, since let's face it, Venter's new artificial genome is really just another incremental step on the path, and besides, I already mentioned that guy recently. So instead, a potpourri of peteresque and popcultural pointers:

Us.

A few developments on the writing front:

• Recorded Books is going to release an audio rendition of Blindsight (which is especially cool since evidently these guys put out the only single-voice English language narration of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy officially approved by the Tolkien Estate). If I'm lucky, they can get Andy Serkis for the performance.
• Heyne, the German publisher putting out the translations of Butt Plug and Down Hill, have made an offer on Maelstrom. After a bit of haggling over money and my insistence that the book's title should be an easy target of juvenile humour once translated, I accepted. (I suspect we even got more for it than Tor did for the Heyne edition of Starfish, although I don't know because Tor still hasn't told me how much that was.) (Yes, I've asked.) This almost makes up for the those one-star Amazon reader review reviews that just shot Blind Flug down from the heady days of unanimous approval it had enjoyed only yesterday (although the sales rank seems to be doing pretty well over there regardless — the book's grazed the five-hundreds a couple of times, which even accounting for the difference in national populations is probably better than it ever did over here).
• It also looks as though a Czech edition of Blindsight is in the works from Triton Books. (On the down side, that Russian deal I mentioned a while back might be a bit shakier than I'd thought — at least, they keep telling me that the deal's still on but I haven't seen a penny of an advance that was due well before the end of last year. I'd probably push them harder if the memory of Cronenberg's Eastern Promises wasn't still so fresh in my mind...)
• Oh yeah, and some doofus over on Futurismic says I'm all in favour of torture and everything. I'm not saying he's wrong, but jeez.

Them.

I don't usually serve up link salads, since they'd generally point to far more popular blogs than mine and thus it would probably be old news to you all anyway. But today I'm making an exception, because the following links lead to things that made me grin broadly, and that doesn't happen as often as I'd like. Also it proves that sometimes I can still "get" popular culture, which also doesn’t happen as often as I'd like:

• xkcd serves up the ultimate AI dream team
• My Elves Are Different retools Flanders Fields to contain the word "douche"
• And finally, I swear, I know people who aren't this smart:

I'm going to go work now. I'm actually writing prose these days. Some day, if you behave badly, I may share some of it with you.