Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Asked and answered

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | Babylon 5, books, scifi | No Comments

Just ordered the new Asked and Answered (part 1) book, containing an organized archive of J. Michael Straczynski’s communication with the fans on the Internet, regarding the creation of the Babylon 5 TV series.

And now …. we wait …..

Tags: Babylon 5

So much for freedom and Democracy in France …. hmmm !

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 | general | No Comments

An employee of the French broadcaster TF1 was fired for writing to a member of Parliament …

see this SlashDot article

So he got fired for having an opinion and writing to his MP from his *private* email, not even from his work.

what comes next ?

Tags: censorship, freedom

Looking at Hugo Awards nominees 2009

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | cons, events, scifi | 2 Comments

This year I decided to become a supporting member of the Worldcon/Anticipation that takes place in August in Montreal, Canada.

With a (supporting) membership of the Worldcon comes the right to vote on the Hugo Awards, the science fiction fans’ own awards.

Not just that, this year a big part of the nominee’s works are made available to the voters, so last week I downloaded the “Hugo Voter’s package 2009″, a zipped file of about 180 MB.

The file contains 4 novels, several novellas, short stories , a graphic novel (as far as I can see, have not opened that file yet), and other contributions, in order to facilitate an enlighttened voting process.

Now I am very happy that I got myself an eBook reader – it would be far too tiring reading that much on the iPod Touch. Still I am not tied to the computer screen, but can read anywhere I want – the Sofa or lazy chair is a good place.

I started reading “Saturn’s Children” by Charles Stross, partly because I expect to see him at a small local con (Fantasticon) in Copenhagen this year.

With 4 novels and all the other material I have a quite sufficient amount of reading to do before the Worldcon, even if I am not going to Montreal. I would like to go to a Worldcon once, especially if it takes place somewhere in (Northern) Europe.

Tags: Add new tag, Hugo Awards, scifi, worldcon