Generosity.
The rest will come along!
A new generation of raspberries
A promise of summer abundance
Posted in Event, Photos, Society
Tagged Canada 150, First of July, generosity, raspberries
Cover of the Fiction River 21, this issue edited by Kerrie L. Hugues, with my funny SF story Closing the Big Bang. The Fiction River collection is directed by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Still basking in the thrill of reading my name on the cover and the warm and glowing introduction that Kristine wrote for the story.
Get your copy on Amazon.com, Amazon Canada or Kobo!
Posted in Event, Science-fiction, Writing
Tagged Anthology, Fiction River, humor, Kerrie L. Hugues, Kris Kathryn Rusch, Science-fiction
Contracts!
That I am working on, hence the delay in getting new gags uploaded on this blog. A few writing and illustration contracts landed in the same week, a rare event.
So this was my first ever marathon, completed in a whopping 5h45min! (See my finish video and some pictures here, the exact personal time is 5h42:52)
I haven’t decided yet if I want run another full one. As you can see I got stiff knees for a few days post-race. But I was fairly better at the Sudbury French bookfair!
However, half-marathons are perfect for me: I completed the first part of the race in a fairly good 2h20!
The training (with a half-marathon group as there was no full training instructor available last January) took long hours from my writing and comics creation. I’d love to run a full 42,2 k under a more favorable weather!
My next race is this Sunday, a 15-km at the Bread and Honey Festival, of Streetsville.
To be continued…
A marathon is like two half-marathons, one after the other, right?
Well, my legs did not agree with this optimist assessment!
Are you nervous signing with a heavy block hanging over your table? I am!
But the worst situation was witnessed here, at the 2008 Paris bookfair. (Yes, it’s me under the triangular sign!)
And to think the British brought their cannons up in pieces!
I ran up the Wolfe Trail, 1,5 km of slope, to train for my upcoming marathon, along with my cousin who is an experienced marathoner. It concluded a 16-km run…
We ran from Anse au Foulon, and went through lots of little signs that explain in detail the operation of passing by this trail to attack Quebec defended by Montcalm. Obviously the trail was not paved …
Nevertheless, I thought about the soldiers wearing those heavy loads and equipment, and about the defenders of Quebec who risked (and lost) their lives.
It’s always easy to say in retrospect, long after the lost battle: “Montcalm should have done this or that, he should wait for reinforcements to Bougainville and Levis instead of an exit …”
But without cell phone, while the besieged Quebec residents lacked everything (Wolfe had burned the fields and razed villages up to 100 km downstream of the city), the Marquis de Montcalm could not actually * know * if his allies and volunteers had not themselves been decimated, or whether the British allies Iroquois warriors would not come later join them to form an unassailable mass.
So he ordered a sortie against an enemy superior in number.
(The two leaders were killed in this battle, which was rather short as columnists reported it: about 15 minutes, for the French engagement.)
*
I am really feeling the exhaustion of the training for the upcoming marathon, hence this shortened comic!
It seems that my marathon training is getting in the way of drawing!
The event is in three weeks…
The latest issue of Galaxies includes my SF short-story, La Cousine Entropie (A Cousin named Entropy).
This is my third publication in this French SF magazine, occurring shortly after my publication in Géante Rouge 23. La cousine Entropie is a long-winded, galaxy-spanning hard SF story, with some bits of humor. And there is more than one cousin…
The text was commissioned by Jean-Pierre Laigle, who sent me an extensive article on the topic of cosmanthropy (that you’ll find in this issue).
Cosmanthropy?
Imagine humans colonizing the entire volume of space, not only planet surfaces, without environmental suits. That trope is less often exploited in science fiction, because of the challenges. Three authors who addressed this topic are interviewed: Jorge Luiz Caliph (Contact diagrams), Laurent Genefort (Thick-skins) and Linda Nagata (The tides of Saturn, which is published in French in this issue).
I remember reading with pleasure Les Peaux Epaisses (Thick Skins) by Laurent Genefort, featuring gen-modified workers in order to survive in the vacuum (and shamefully exploited). I am reading Memory by Linda Nagata, a planet-opera.
Spider and Jeanne Robinson had created Star Dance, a title also mentioned in the article by Jean-Pierre. Star Dance chronicle the birth of Homo caelestis. Jeanne was an accomplished dancer and very Zen. She left us, regretfully in 2010, but the Star Dance project page is still there to make us dream.
Posted in Event, Science-fiction, Society, Writing
Tagged Entropy, Galaxies magazine, humor, Jean-Pierre Laigle, Jeanne Robinson, Linda Nagata, Science-fiction, Spider Robinson, Writing
