Good luck with "Lobsters"! Meeting you is forcing me to consider attending Boskone, which would be my first con ever.

Ask how many maintence people each floor takes, and how many technology ideas they are asked ror each weak, after their examimation, exposure, and conteomplation. Ask who cleans the whiteboards, and how often the are asked for ideas. Ask if the guy who straightens the bosses's office ever gets to think about he ideas he seas, and what he thinks.

Have done that all, I ask.

The main thing to remember is that a lot of people use these doors and elevators, and many of them deliver the newspaper, bringin and out the water bottles, carry out the garbage cans, check the lightbulbs, and so on. And then we/they go down to the trucks for some lunch. and watch the other social culture. which is far more interesting. and that takes place in the larger political culture, whis is busily agitating about george bush, etc. Via signs and signs.

best,
gf

Actually, Charlie (and Patrick), when we were in the middle of the great unfinished rasfc faq-revising process, we did trace the rasfc usage back to Teresa -- although her usage was "waxing the cat", and Jo Walton was the first person in google's archives to use "cat vacuuming". Actual quotes are on page behind that link, somewhere near the bottom.

- Brooks

"...When you walk through a door labelled "Centre for Bits and Atoms"

I suspect they haven't changed it to that, actually, he nitpicked for the sake of nitpicking.

Re Myers-Briggs test:

Last time I did one of them i got classified as NNTP...

Have you noticed Myers-Briggs tests *never* have a bad word to say about any of the classes? I rather suspect that if they've any diagnostic usage at all, it's to tell people what they might want to hear about themselves.

Martin Wisse said:
Re Myers-Briggs test:
Last time I did one of them i got classified as NNTP...

 That's news to me.

Acid-free paper? Ah, luxury...

Aside: Is British bookbinding still in the same sorry state it has been since WW2 rationing/post-war austerity, with virtually nobody using sewn bindings or acid-free paper? Or has the industry lifted its game somewhat?

It depends how much you're willing to pay -- and who the publisher is. Put it this way, austerity has been replaced by competition to keep costs down ...

So tell me, Charlie, why do SF writers, alone amongst most others, insist on piling on the forewords, introductions, postscripts and all that self-exegesis? Not that I'm against them -- and often end up, in the case of Harlan Ellison, who seems to be the main culprit, just reading the commentaries and skipping the fiction -- but it does strike me as a particular SF phenomenon.

-- http://amblongus.com

Harlan Ellison probably does as much as everyone else in the field put together.

It also happens much less today than it did a couple of decades ago. My guess is that this is because there's more in the way of critical scholarship in the SF field; writers with something to say about fiction are now able to give papers at conferences or in journals like Foundation or the New York Review of Science Fiction, rather than blowing off steam than in their books.

Having said that, there does seem to be a bit of a tradition involved in writing forewards to collections, and THE ATROCITY ARCHIVE is (in my case) more of a collection than an individual novel -- there are, after all, two stories in it.

sorry Charlie but I might have to wait for the paperback (I hope there is a paperback!) especially as I already forked out 12 quid to read in Spectrum and I can't really afford to pay $24 + shipping fees for a novella and an introduction, although I'm sure they are both great (I'm a big Ken Macload fan too).

Will there be a paperback edition? It's just that the Golden Gryphon website doesn't seem to mention one.

Golden Gryphon are a hardcover-only publisher. Paperback rights have not been sold (at least, not in English -- there's a French translation due some time this year). If I do get a paperback deal (or a UK publisher), you'll see it in my blog as soon as it's solid.