Morality and Autonomous Cars

Via The Daily Dish but originally by . . . Nick Carr?  Really?

So you’re happily tweeting away as your Google self-driving car crosses a bridge, its speed precisely synced to the 50 m.p.h. limit. A group of frisky schoolchildren is also heading across the bridge, on the pedestrian walkway. Suddenly, there’s a tussle, and three of the kids are pushed into the road, right in your vehicle’s path. Your self-driving car has a fraction of a second to make a choice: Either it swerves off the bridge, possibly killing you, or it runs over the children. What does the Google algorithm tell it to do?

Seems easy enough to me.  It tries to brake, runs over the children, and does everything possible to record everything about the situation to protected memory that can only be accessed by law enforcement.  The car is going to have to be programmed to do it's best with the variables that it can control while protecting the occupant of the car who is riding in it.  The kids on the road are an aberration, something that the car can't control, couldn't have expected, and so it should have no responsibility to protect something that steps in front of it while traveling at speed.

But it's also going to have to prove that after the fact, with a higher bar of proof than a human would have in the same situation.  the car is going to have to show what it saw (the raw recordings), what it thought it saw (the analysis), and record the decisions that it made about what to do.

Just to point out, it's highly unlikely that self-driving cars are going to be able to determine between a single dog and a group of three children in the road.  Whatever instructions the car has are going to have to take into account for the fact that it won't be able to assign a value to the object in the road.  If your car regularly drives into ditches (or off bridges) for dogs and deer, then people are going to be incredibly more upset than with the unfortunate situation described above because they're going to be injured at a much higher rate over the actions of wild animals rather than very rare occurrences of children being hurt in unavoidable situations.

And just to point out . . . it's unlikely this situation would result in criminal charges for a human driver, especially if the kids were pushed into the road.  The legal culpability is with the person doing the pushing.

All of this speculation ignores one important point: the car isn't going to have to make the moral judgement.  The law is going to have to make these decisions, hopefully up front, and Google and the car companies are going to have to program their cars accordingly.

U.S. Troops doing "Call Me Maybe"

Hey look, it's another shirtless male version of "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen.  How could I resist:

http://youtu.be/B_zhaji9eos

Wow, that soldier with the eagle chest tattoo is exceedingly good looking.

Best Wishes

I sincerely hope that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Scott Brown have long, healthy and happy lives, filled with family and friends and happy occasions that are too numerous to count.

I hope the same for Obama, Biden, and Warren, but that they also have long and successful careers after winning today's elections.

Best wishes to all.

Please Stop Lying

Look, we both know that you're lying to me.

I know why I support Barack Obama.  He's not a perfect President, but he's done a lot of good things during his time in office. When I weigh the positive things that he says he will do (and the positive things that he has done) against the points where I disagree with him I come out with a net positive.  He's a worthwhile person to vote for on his own merits, although I remain hopeful the Democrats will present even better  candidates in the future.

But I have absolutely no clue why you support Mitt Romney, and that's because you keep lying to me about it.

This isn't a politician or a political pundit problem, this is the problem that happens when you, as a Republican voter, try to explain to me why you support Willard Mitt Romney, especially after having supported George W. Bush.

You don't like East Coast ivory tower elitists?  Bush went to Yale.  Romney has two degrees from Harvard.  They both have rather advanced degrees in business too.  It seems like you're pretty comfortable with East Coast elitists, actually.

You want business experience?  You know that Bush's oil company eventually had to be shuttered and bought by family friends, right?  And both of them started in management because of their fancy educations, it's not like they worked their way to the top of a company through the sweat of their brow. And don't get me started on the multi-million dollar loans that Romney got from his father in order to found Bain.  He didn't inherit anything from his father, right.

"Someone that you can have a beer with?" That's bull.  Obama drinks beer.  Bush is an alcoholic and doesn't drink, Romney just doesn't drink for religious reasons.

A good Christian man?  Okay, just to point out that the only Protestant in the race for President or Vice-President this year is Obama, and that Mormonism is generally considered a cult by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.

But remember when you Republicans said that we needed someone with military experience (which neither Romney nor Ryan has), a Washington outsider (which neither Romney nor Ryan are), someone that understands middle class values (please), and then attacked Kerry for being a flip-flopper (because consistency is key to winning conservative votes or something)?  All of those things are lies.  Obvious lies, because when Democrats put forth candidates that fill those qualifications, Republicans don't vote for them.

I'll grant you that Romney and Bush have had more business experience than Obama and Clinton have had (possibly combined . . . did Clinton run his own law firm? I don't think so.), although I'd be more than happy to argue the content of that experience with you.  Romney's experience is in capital investment, so are we going to stipulate that the experience that running the U.S. government requires right now is giving massive amounts of money to private corporations?  But you know what, Republicans also ran John McCain, a man with zero business experience and teamed him up with Sarah Palin, a woman with zero business experience.  So, you know, it's not even like Republicans have this single issue as a consistent thread through their candidates.

Altogether, the general comments about why you should vote for the Republican are transparent lies, because your criteria change from election to election.

I vote for the person that (1) can win and (2) best represents my opinions on national issues.  That's just me, not every Democrat in the country, but it's better than the 50 million people in this country that are going to vote for a Republican candidate for reasons that they're not actually going to talk about truthfully.

And after all that, all the lies about why Bush/Romney/McCain are just the kind of guy that you want in the White House, then there are all the things that the specific accusations that you make about Obama that are patently false.

He's a communist or a socialist?  Hardly.  He's a darn good capitalist with minimal regulatory impulses. Oil drilling permits are up, banks are still allowed to speculate with invested money still, and Obamacare was a massive boon to private insurers.

Speaking of Obamacare, he's not going to sentence your grandmother to death panels, doctors don't hate him, and repealing Obamacare would cost America billions of dollars.  Heck, even the "he's cutting $700 billion dollars from medicare" thing is a transparent lie under even cursory examination.

He doesn't believe in America? Okay, aside from the ludicrous nature of accusing the President of a country of "not believing" in the country that he leads, every action he takes as President and speech he gives just underlines the lie in this.  A President that didn't believe in America wouldn't have necessarily have fought for American jobs in the car companies.

He apologizes for America?  No, he really hasn't and anytime anyone asks for actual video footage of these world-wide apology tours that he's rumored to have done, the answer is "Well he has!" Gods, what terrific lies.

He's bribing voters with government handouts . . . ?  That argument would make a lot more sense if the Bush taxcuts hadn't involved sending out checks, poor white people on government assistance didn't vote for Republicans in such high numbers, and the number of government workers wasn't falling under Obama.

Obama is so weak that terrorists are going being emboldened to attack the USA?  Again, that's bull.  He killed Osama bin Laden, he's the one that conducted operations in Libya, he's not the one that couldn't even declare a date for leaving the countries he invaded because he didn't know what he was doing.

I'm not even going to touch the insanity that is birtherism or the claims that he's a Muslim.  I'm just going to pretend that you don't believe that stuff for a minute.

He's a divider not a uniter?  He bent over backward to work on Republican proposals and plans, and couldn't even get votes on their own legislative agendas.  They just quit working to prevent him from having any achievements for even the smallest things.

He's attacking freedom?  Okay, first, the party of George W. Bush is making that claim, really?  How can you mantain a straight face. Secondly, how exactly is he rolling back, attacking, or otherwise limiting freedom?  A reminder that Obama's not proposing a constitutional amendment to limit your ability to form relationships, nor your ability to control medical decisions regarding your own body.  Those are Republican proposals (so much for the limited nature of the federal government, eh?).

You get what all of this stuff has in common, right?  All of the personal attacks on Obama, all of the party attacks on the Democratic Party, and all of the bizarre policy attacks?

They're all f*cking lies.

None of this bullshit is true at all.  Seriously, look through the list.  None of those positions or accusations are true.

So here's what I'm asking you to do.  Please, just stop lying to me.  In the meantime though, while you continue to spew this filth all over yourselves and your reputations, I'm just going to have to stand back and try my best to ignore you.

Maybe, when you've stopped lying about every conceivable political stance that you and your party hold I'll reconsider.

Hot Guys Shirtlessly Lipsyncing on YouTube

I'm just saying, this is a great, great trend.  I meant to put together one of these posts when it was just Sexy And I Know It by LMFAO, but why limit it?  Especially after the Abercrombie Boys did Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen:

Yeah, can't argue with that one.  But there are lots of other beautiful options.

Here's "Call Me Gaybe", another Call Me Maybe cover:

Here's Chi Cho, Snyz, BJ Smiles, and Laces' cover, which is kind of low quality video, but the guys are great:

Here's a version that I hadn't seen until I started looking for this post done by "The Boys of GG20" i.e. members of the Gay and Gorgeous Twenty-something group on Facebook.

And the final shirtless Call Me Maybe is the Weho Queens version, which features at least one porn star . . . and it looks like he has personality as well:

And the honorable mention for Call Me Maybe goes to the Harvard Men's Baseball team for their cover, which doesn't feature nearly nearly enough shirtlessness but makes up for it with some cute guys:

And then we move on to covers of Sexy And I Know It By LMFAO.  First one up is my favorite by SpandyAndy, and basically the guy who kicked off this entire idea:

And then the unbelievably hot Tom Daley and "Team Great Britain" diving team doing it.  These guys are amazing:

And the next one is the "Banned" US Air Force Academy version:

Here's some hot, presumably Russian, guys doing a stage version:

The best, and by best I mean most shirtless, parody of this song that I can find is this version of what I think is "I'm Jewish and I know it" filmed last year:

And of course, the happy runner up has to be the original version from LMFAO, which sadly can't be embedded.  So here's a link instead.

There are some runner up songs as well.  Some of my favorites include California Gays (a parody of California Girls by Katy Perry):

How about Take it Off from Ke$ha, done by the Boys of Boston:

ˇ

There's the awesome Daft Punk Harder Better Faster Stronger "Male Version."  It isn't really lip syncing, but it's hot anyway.

Erik Rhodes

Erik Rhodes was a gay porn star.  He was also unhappy, and by unhappy I mean depressed, much in the same way that I'm depressed.

There aren't very many similarities between us after the homosexuality and the depression.  Erik was gorgeous and he was gorgeous through hard work.  He worked out often, although he used steroids to bulk up.  He was, as I already mentioned, a gay porn star and unlike most of the time when people use that phrase he actually fit the "star" part.  He was, in the limited circles of gay porn fandom, really well known and did a lot of work for many years.  He also would go to events and parties that raised his profile beyond just porn.  He did drugs.  He drank.  He was an escort.  He liked music.  He was, apparently, very outgoing and could be funny and nice to almost anyone.  He was, for a porn star, a really excellent actor.

Erik died earlier this week of a heart attack at age 30, presumably of complications resulting from overuse of steroids.  He earned a NYT obituary which can be found here.

His real name was James.  If you don't mind, I'm going to continue calling him Erik, although I'd prefer if you don't forget that James is a real person and I'm sure his loss is devastating to people who actually knew him.  My sympathy goes out to them.

Erik was one of my favorite porn stars.  Not necessary because of his body type.  He was more muscular than I normally like.  I don't remember seeing him for the first time, nor do I remember how many times I saw him before he was recognizable to me.

But eventually he became recognizable and through the magic of the internet and the fact that I recognized him and his porn name, I eventually was linked to his blog where I learned about his exceedingly deep depression.  He put a lot of himself out there on that blog, and by reading there I was able to see some of the disconnect between media stars and their fans.  When you put yourself out there like Erik did, people that you've never met connect to you and they end up with feelings about you.  Good, bad, sexual, they build this one-sided relationship in their heads that makes it basically impossible for the media star to ever connect with.  You care about them, but they can't care about you. That star doesn't know you, and they'll never understand the emotional connection that you, the fan, had with them because they weren't there as it was built.

So, as I understand it, Erik was alone in his head.  Mostly.

I desired him.  He wasn't perfectly my type, but don't get me wrong, I thought he was hot even so.  I intellectually know that probably made actually getting to know him impossible but when I started reading his blog and found out that he was depressed my first instinct was to reach out to him.  To try to let him know that even if he couldn't see it, that there were people that cared about him.  I wanted to try to explain how impressed that I was by the work ethic demonstrated by his body.  How good I thought his life was and that if all he needed was people that cared for him that those people were there.  How I thought he was, in some sense, a role model for the people that couldn't understand that a gay guy might also be a masculine guy.

I remember offering to buy him lunch when I lived in New York City as well.  I left it as a comment on his blog.  I don't know if he ever saw that post or any of the few other comments that I left, but I was just one more creepy overly familiar voice on his website.  I would have ignored me too, probably.

But between reading his blog, living in the same city as he did for a while and seeing flashes of him at various events he switched over from someone that doesn't really exist in my world to someone that could exist in it.  I'll never meet the Pope, but I thought some day I could at least meet Erik.  Maybe give him a hug.

It's weird to think of Erik as dead.  It means that I won't ever get to meet him, that whatever that situation would have led to is impossible.

I assume that this is the way that some people feel when celebrities die.  That they've built this tree of possibility in their heads, and the person dies and the possibilities all die with them.  It leaves a gap.  Something that should be there but isn't anymore.

I don't think that Erik or James ever found happiness or even peace, which is sad but not unexpected.  People's lives don't usually get closure, and when you're 30 and seemingly in great health I don't thing most people try to provide that emotional "we care about you" that you get with a lingering illness.

Erik died last Thursday.  A week ago tomorrow, as I type this.  I don't think, when I first found out, that I could have realized exactly how much his death would affect me.

I was in the middle of typing that previous paragraph when I looked up his obituary to check what day he died.  I've linked it up above where I think it fits.  And then I read it.  Yeah, I already knew his name was James, but I didn't know that he was HIV positive.  I didn't know that he was still an escort.  I didn't remember that he was romantically linked to Mark Jacobs and I didn't know that he knew Jake Shears.  Does it make it better than I knew him so little and that he knew me not at all?

I don't know.

My thoughts go out to his family and especially his brother in what must be a difficult time for them.

Racism

Sometimes the thing that scares me the most about racism is how abjectly people deny racism. And then they ten times more strongly deny their own racism.

If you can't see the issue of race when an unarmed black teenager is shot after being chased by a neighborhood watch, then you are denying the existence of racism.

If you can't see the issue of race when saying that making a character black instead of white makes her death less emotional, you are denying your own racism.

I'm racist sometimes. It sucks to say that, but it's true. And instead of trying to deny that, I try to realize when it happens so that I can correct myself.

Were I to pretend to not be racist though, I would have to actively pretend not to care when I slipped up or white-washed a character (I thought Cinna was white. I also think that Lenny Kravitz did a great job in the role). And that's the most harmful bit about all the racism that's floating around right now. If you're denying it, you're actively making racism worse, not better.

Gingrich in the lead

I have just a quick response to Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina:

You can't vote for Gingrich and claim that you aren't defending outright corruption. This isn't a guy who can plausibly deny wrongdoing, and no matter what you think of Obama, you can't say that he's been investigated and found guilty of corruption like Gingrich has.

I can't really believe that Republicans have voted for him, and it's really kind of sad. I feel really sorry for people that support him, because I just don't understand them.

There has been a question that's been swirling around in my head recently about Gingrich, but it's on a more personal matter:

"Mr. Gingrich, as the candidate of the family values party and as a faithful Catholic, who do you think more exemplifies the family values that you want to see most Americans follow, you or President Obama."

He'd have to reject the premise of the question, but it would still be fun to ask.

BestSFBooks Ranking System

So, since I'm sort of obsessed with Speculative Fiction awards (you may have noticed), my boyfriend emailed me a link the other day:

BestSFBooks

I took one look at it and decided that I have serious disagreements with the rankings generated by that site, although they generally do what I do, which is count various awards that books get and then rank them by the number of awards and nominations.

The first issue that I have with their method of ranking is that they count the wins and the nominations at the same value. Which has some merit, I admit. I also maintain a straight count of nominations and wins counted as "1" each. You can look at that and get a 2 vs. a 6 and generally tell that if that first book has two wins and the second book has six nominations, that second book is probably wider liked among a general audience.

But I also maintain a "weighted" score which provides me with a different look: where wins are worth 1 and nominations are worth .5. A book with three wins should have a higher ranking than a book with 3 nominations or even a book with 5 nominations. And so you can easily differentiate in that way between the big winners and the big nominations.

If you're looking for a list of the best speculative fiction, I don't think the straight number of awards gets you to that book. The BestSFBooks site gives second place over the last 3 years to Anathema and The Dervish House each with a count of 7. But The Dervish House has 4 wins and Anathema has 3. If you're looking for an actual ranking of the books, then I would rank Dervish House higher than Anathema, although I would still rate Anathema higher than a book that got 3 wins and two nominations (like Blackout).

The second quibble that I have with their rankings is that they're weighted toward British Books.

Several of the awards that they rank are international. Hugo Awards, Locus SF/Fantasy Awards, John W. Campbell Awards, and World Fantasy Award are (as far as I can determine) all open to books published anywhere in the world. Hugo Awards are explicitly open to books in any language, although the general voting membership is English speaking and I don't think a non-English book has ever made the shortlist.

But BestSFBooks also lists the British Fantasy Society Award, British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Awards, all of which are only open to books published in the U.K.

Those Awards directly compare to only one strictly American award: the Nebula Award. And, while the American Nebula Award can go to either a science fiction or fantasy book, those categories are split out amongst two of the previously listed British awards, giving double weight and twice as many nominations to the British awards before even taking into account the Arthur C. Clarke excess.

There is one more American award on their list, the Philip K. Dick award, but the Philip K. Dick award can't be directly compared to the British awards, or even the other American awards. The Philip K. Dick award is specific to a subset of American speculative publishing: original paperback science fiction publications, which means that usually the awards go to books that aren't nominated in any of the rest of the categories. There are notable exceptions (Yarn, Nova Swing, The Devil's Advocate), but mostly the Philip K. Dick award targets an entirely different category or book than the other American science fiction awards do, so it doesn't tend to boost the numbers of awards from American authors. In fact, since the Philip K. Dick targets some books that are paperback reprints of British books, it can further inflate the number of wins or nominations of British works (such is the case with Nova Swing, for example).

So the top books on the recent lists are British, and there are a lot of British authors on top as well. This year, skipping the obvious winner of The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (sometimes the out-and-out winner is British, I have no quibble with that) there are two British books and two British authors on top of the first American in either category. Overall, there are five British books and five authors writing in the British scene on the top 10 award winning lists of the last year.

Over the last three years, you can see much of the same. Five of the site's best speculative fiction books are from British authors, but there is a shift as 6 of the top 10 "best" authors are writing for a primarily British audience as well.

Over ten years, the 10 best books have Americans in only three spaces. And there are only four Americans on the authors top 10 list.

All of this shouldn't be construed as implying that British science fiction authorship isn't enjoying a bit of a golden age at the moment, with authors like Mieville, Stross, Gaiman, McDonald and Clarke, but I do think that the way that BestSFBooks counts it's points skews toward British writers and books.

Third, I'm not sure that I would count the SFsite Reader's and Editor's choices as awards with the same weight as the Hugos, Nebulas, and Locus awards. Or even smaller awards like the Philip K. Dick. That's just a personal choice though, in the same way that I count the "big three" as the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards (I freely admit my Amerocentrism, and my list is primarily for me) despite the John W. Campbell awards' claims.

Fourth, and I agree that this is a bit quibbly with regard to a website called BestSFBooks, but they're really doing a disservice leaving off all of the rest of the categories beyond novel. There are some amazing short stories out there, and there are plenty of novellas that get limited publication as their own books. Heads by Greg Bear jumps instantly to mind.

Finally, i wish they had an "all-time" option. There are lots of great older books that could easily rank against more recent books if BestSFBooks gave them the chance to compete. Let's see some Ursula K. Le Guin toward the top.

Kudos to them for maintaining a usable, clear and professional site though. That isn't easy and they should be lauded for that.

Why isn't Connie Willis really famous?

So, one of my four favorite science fiction authors won another Hugo award yesterday. I haven't read her latest duet of novels, Black Out/All Clear, but I own them and they'll be read soon. Nearly everything that I've read by her has been brilliant though, even her book of science fiction Christmas stories (it works surprisingly well).

That Hugo Award win means that Connie Willis joins the tiny club of Robert Heinlein, Lois McMaster Bujold, Vernor Vinge and Isaac Asimov as the winner of more than two Hugo Awards for Best Novel, although Asimov and Heinlein have the slight asterisk of having won a retro Hugo (given for a year prior to the establishment of the Hugos in retrospect) among his honors. Bujold and Asmiov have four, and Vinge and Willis have three.

But that doesn't mean that she's just won three Hugo awards. She's won eleven total in all categories including short stories, novellas, and once for a novelette. All four major fiction categories. And she's won seven Nebula Awards, again in all four categories.

And there's the additional matter of the ten Locus awards, again in all four categories and the additional category of best collection (twice). Granted, she's missing the fantasy novel category at the Locus awards, but she was nominated once for it.

So, she's won all of the major science fiction awards, in all twelve of the categories that they have for them (and a Locus thirteenth).

Asimov was writing before and while the three major categories of awards here were being formed. His Foundation series, which is still brilliant, missed the start of the Nebula and Locus awards by more than ten and twenty years respectively, but did win the previously mentioned retro Hugo award for one of it's sections, and a special Hugo (ish*) award for "Best all-time series." Overall, he still won 6 normal Hugos (missed the novella category), 2 special Hugos, 2 Nebulas (for novel and novelette), and 7 Locus awards (again, no award for novellas but he did win for Nonfiction [twice] and for anthology). Were you to weight those wins the same, that's 17 major wins across his lifetime.

Bujold is next. She's won those four Hugo awards for novels but only one other Hugo category, novella for The Mountains of Mourning. Bujold also has 3 Nebula awards, two novels and a novella (again for The Mountains of Mourning). She also has three Locus award wins, two for science fiction novels and once for fantasy novel (the locus splits those two up). That's eleven total.

Heinlein, similar to Asimov, was writing before the major awards were completely established, and I actually suspect this hurt him more than Asimov. He's got those four Hugo awards for best novel, one retro Hugo, and one retro Novella Hugo for a total of six. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any Nebula awards, but again, they started late and he finished rather early, although he was still nominated for best novel four different times. He does have two Locus awards, once for Job: A Comedy of Justice (fantasy novel) and a nonfiction book. So that's only eight total.

Vernor Vinge, whose work I also love, has five Hugo award in total. Three of his Hugo awards are for best novel, and two are for novella. He also has no Nebula awards (that just amazes me, actually) even though unlike Heinlein he began writing after the start of these awards. He also has two Locus awards, one for novel and one for novella (The Cookie Monster, great story, I highly recommend it). That's only six major wins across the three major science fiction awards that I'm tracking here.

Before I get back around to Connie Willis, I'm going to throw two other names out there that are required on this list: the first is Ursula K. Le Guin. She's won an astonishing number of awards. Like Connie Willis, she's won all four of the major Hugo categories (and she was the first woman to win for best novel), plus a second Hugo award for best novel for a total of five Hugos. She's won six Nebula awards (four novels, one short story, one novelette). And get this, she's won twenty-one Locus Awards in basically everything that you can possibly win, all five of the major categories (sf novel and fantasy novel, novella, novelette, short story) plus nonfiction, plus collections (five of them). And, just to make this complicated, she's also won two World Fantasy Awards, one for best novella and novel, too. That's 32 major wins without the two WFAs, and 34 with.

The second is Neil Gaiman. He's won four Hugos, with two novels and a novella and short story. He's won two Nebulas, one each for novel and novella. And he's won 15 Locus awards, including being the only person on the list to win for the Locus best YA novel category (he's won it twice) although like Asimov he doesn't have one in the Novella category. Gaiman, like Le Guin, has also won a World Fantasy Award, although in his case it's for short story. That's 22 major wins with the WFA, and 21 without.

So let's get around back to Connie Willis. As I pointed out, she's won those eleven Hugos, seven Nebulas, and ten Locus awards. That's 28 major award wins. 28 major award wins including just about every major science fiction category and major novel wins. Doomsday Book won all three major science fiction awards for best novel, incidentally.

So, as far as this little survey goes, Connie Willis is the second most award winning science fiction/fantasy author in English, trailing Ursula K. Le Guin by four or six wins depending on how you count. And she leads Neil Gaiman, Vernor Vinge, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein by sizable margins. And, if this wasn't already clear she's the only person, ever, to dual win both the Hugo and the Nebula award in every single category.

And tonight, the day after she won her 28th major award, we had some friends over for dinner. We talked science fiction for a bit and I recommended Connie Willis. And despite being a consistent reader of science fiction, he'd never heard of her before. We would have loaned him a copy of To Say Nothing of the Dog on the spot, but apparently we've already lent it out. That still staggers me. She's one of the most award winning science fiction writers of all time, and she's still completely unknown, even among many devoted science fiction fans.

Why isn't Connie Willis really famous? I just don't understand.


* Just to be clear, the best all-time series was a special Worldcon award, but since the Hugo rules apparently allows the Worldcon to tack on awards, I'm not exactly sure why it isn't explicitly a Hugo award.