Whiney, Shiney, Cerebrospiney

So much happened during my absence on the Island. Worldcon, for one. For another, a big honking propane storage facility blew up in the northwestern 'burbs of Greater Toronto, provoking howls of outrage from concerned citizens who wanted to know how such a dangerous facility ended up in the heart of a residential area. (And am I the only person who thinks that that's exactly where all such hazardous facilities should be? It's not as though the wildlife of northern Ontario are using the stuff; why should they bear the risks of a product we demand? Has anyone seen hard-hatted grizzly bears pumping their shit into our living rooms since Gary Larsen went away?)

But today I think I'll serve up a tripartite brain sampler; three little appetizers concerning neurons that are in turn whiney, shiny, and cerebrospinal.

Cerebrospiney: being the kind of fluid that's now filling the great cavernous hole in six-year-old Jessie Hall's head after doctors cut out half her brain to control seizures resulting from Rasmussen's encephalitis. Her father (who I'm sure has never heard the name Siri Keeton) says that there's no memory loss and that she's "the same Jessie" she always was. Of course, he also said that her survival was "a miracle of medicine and God"— presumably the same God who stuck the encephalitis into her head in the first place. Which would logically make the liberation of Auschwitz at the end of WW2 "a miracle of the Russians and Nazis". Man, what I wouldn't give to have God's PR guy on my side.

Shiney: being the porridge of rat neurons running Gordon, an echolocating robot out of the University of Reading. (Most of you have already seen this; at least, most of you seem to have sent me the links.) It's getting close enough to the head-cheeses of the rifters trilogy— right down to the little rows of electrodes poking up into the tissue and incipient behavioral unpredictability— that Technovelgy describes it as "a pretty exact match" to the rifters vision, and although that's a big overstatement I am tickled at the nod because not too many other authors seem to have picked up on the whole head-cheese thing way back in the twentieth century. But it's probably worth noting the slightly grumpy dissent of Steve Potter from the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose work is extensively cited in New Scientist's coverage (check the comments for this entry). Potter regards the Reading work as just another incremental step on the path, and not nearly so shiny as the popular press has made it out to be (although if you ask me, cultured neurons running robot bodies is pretty damn shiny no matter how you slice 'em). Could just be the sour grapes of an upstaged rival, of course. Still, anyone who's spent more than thirty seconds in academia will know that it's not the people with the best ideas who rise to the top; it's the people with the best self-promotion. Just like everywhere else on the planet.

Whiney: being my own neurons, which may verge on paranoid at the best of times, but that doesn't mean everyone isn't out to ignore me (well, everyone except Technovelgy, I guess). Take these i09 folks, for example. A while back they did a list of recent sf novels that put the "hard" back into sf. And you know, there are a lot of those, so you really can't feel too hard done by if your own book doesn't make the list, even if none of those that did came with a hundred-plus technical references. The fact that one of the novels they did cite was self-published made me wonder how widely they'd cast their net for candidates, but whatever. At least a couple of folks mentioned Blindsight in the Comments section.

But now they've done a piece on science-fiction rationales for vampires, and I'm sorry r's and K's but I own that particular bit of the genre. And Blindsight did not exactly go unmentioned in the field. I mean, come on, people: Half a dozen final award ballots. Multiple printings. Eight languages. Marc Andreessen even put it on his list of the best sf novels of the new century, and a good chunk of those hundred-plus technical references appeared under the heading "A brief primer on vampire biology". There's even a Powerpoint for chrissakes (or there was, until Flash fucked everything up with their so-called "upgrade"). So do you think Blindsight finally got a nod over at i09?

Not a whisper. Unless you count all those people in the Comments section, wondering why Blindsight wasn't mentioned.

I mean, seriously. What does it take to get a date with these people? I'll even bring my own kneepads.

And what does "i09" even mean, anyway?