I’ve spent most of the day going “zomg”.
I said it in the shower. I said it up and down Oxford Street (my iPhone went into some kind of explosive decompression over night; apparently, strange magnetic fields have torn the motherboard asunder. I assume someone must have been transporting a massive solenoid down the high street. Gives you a bit of a Miracleman feeling.)
For those of you who are wondering what “zomg” means – it’s an internet acronym. It stands for “oh my God”. (The “z” is a secret teh Internets thing. We don’t talk about it.)
Zomg.
The reason I’m saying “zomg” – apart from it being an inherently hilarious word, and the fact that some secret government agency is apparently moving hypermagnets through north London to destinations unknown – is that I am on the shortlist for the BSFA Awards. (The hypermagnets appear to have got to the BSFA site, too, but by the time you read this there’s a fair chance it will all be fine again. Nothing to see here. Everything is under control.)
The full (short) list is:
Best Novel
Flood by Stephen Baxter
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Do you begin to see why I am saying “zomg” and talking nonsense about hypermagnets?
I may have mentioned that Stephenson is something of a fave. In fact, Anathem was pretty much the first book I mentioned here apart from my own. Stephen Baxter’s Manifold series is something Tom put me onto a while back because I mentioned surviving the heat death of the Universe. (I miss Tom. There are very few people I could have that conversation with. Most people tend to run screaming from the room at that point, and I have to acknowledge that I can see why.) I pretty much blew through it in a week, desperate to know how it turned out. And Ken MacLeod… until I read Star Fraction I hadn’t considered political-science fiction… I get very over-excited when the new MacLeod comes out.
I kinda feel like the new reindeer taking position next to Prancer, Dancer, and Rudolf.
