My Jetpack and Echopraxia

I’m probably the last person on Earth to find Tom Gauld’s Tumblr You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack but I’m posting it anyway because it’s adorable, man.

Found it via the illustrations posted in Fata Libelli’s interview with Canadian SF writer/marine biologist Peter Watts. I read Watts’s novel Blindsight this weekend — I’m a little reviewed out so I won’t be writing about it beyond saying that it’s some of the best cutting-edge hard SF I’ve read in a long time, just packed with ideas about consciousness and alien biology. That makes it sound dry but it’s actually a pretty wrenching read. Watts talks about it a bit in the interview, especially about the almost criminally negligent release by his publisher.

Watts has a “whilequel” (I just made that word up!) of Blindsight coming out in August 2014, Echopraxia, which sounds amazing and sports a magnificent cover from Richard Anderson.

Incidentally, if you’re a fan of John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, check out Watts’s story “The Things” in Clarkesworld magazine, which presents the alien’s point of view, in other words “why I absorbed those guys and why they should really be thanking me.” The creepy part of it is that the thing makes a pretty convincing case.