I'd never read anything by John Scalzi, who comes highly recommended, so I chose to start with Old Man's War, which proved an easy and entertaining entry point for his brand of science fiction and character development.

In the future, life on Earth looks pretty similar to today — but one enterprising company has perfected and privatized interstellar travel. The only way to leave Earth is through them, and they don't let you or your messages ever come back. Plus, you have to join their militia — and the minimum age to do so is 75.

So when the elderly John faces life as a widower, does he stay on Earth, get old, and die… or does he say goodbye to everyone and everything he's ever known and leave for the stars, in the hope that, among this company's impressive technology, is the way to make a 75-year-old body into fighting form again?

It'd be a short book if John chose the former. Instead, readers get to follow along as he seeks out new life and new civilizations — and kills them. Apparently, habitable real estate is tough to come by, and humanity is vying against several competing races to colonize them. John, a former graphic designer, is introduced to a military life with a very high fatality rate, where friends come, go, and are replaced. He handles all this change rather smoothly, cramming a lot of material into one book. But the best parts aren't the technology, but the dialogue. Other characters come to life in unexpected ways, whether it's during demanding battle scenes or off-time in the lounge.

One oversight bothered me: it was acknowledged, but never addressed why, that humanity's sole interaction with alien races is combative and not diplomatic. But I didn't discover until the last page that this book is the first in a trilogy. Perhaps future installments will expand on this relationship.

Overall, I found Old Man's War fun and easy read that would make me receptive to its sequels.



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Gods of Justice features ten stories, each by a different author and set in its own universes, giving diverse experiences at the applications and implications of superpowers. Some people are about to discover their superpowers; some are confronted with new challenges; others are called out of retirement. Be it the present or future, Earth or elsewhere, the different settings are easy to get into.

My favorites were Lisa Gail Green's "Identity Crisis", about a teenager who finds out her twin sister is a superhero; Kevin Hosey's "Blunt Force Trauma", about a murder-mystery surrounding an old teammate; and K. Stoddard Hayes' "The Dodge", inexplicably set on an Old West planet and starring a sheriff who must keep his power a secret from everyone. Least favorites were "Neutral Ground", set on the battlefields of World War I; "Breaking the Circle", about a temporal paradox; and "The Justice Blues", about an abusive superhusband.

If I understand correctly, this anthology's primary format is an e-book, which may've contributed to the occasional lack of copyediting, allowing "bowls" to be substituted for "bowels", for example. But such issues are rare and don't occur where they could confuse.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This B&W graphic novel collects the first several issues of the early 1980s comic book "Concrete", about a political speechwriter whose brain is transplanted into an impenetrable body by aliens. Freed from military directives, Concrete sets out to explore the world and do the things he was always afraid or unable to do before. It's a refreshing change from the typical superhero approach and one that feels like it was written as a reflection of, not contemporary to, the Eighties.

When I first started the book, I felt like I'd come in on the middle of the story, and that the trade paperback must've omitted some origin story. As it turns out, all that is revealed by the end of the book.

I wouldn't mind reading more of these. Thanks for the recommendation, Stepto!



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I've slowly been trying to rectify that over the past few years, during which time I've read Dune, Foundation, Discworld, Ringworld, Ender's Game, I Am Legend, and Game of Thrones (before it was a television series). My current assignment is The Left Hand of Darkness, after which I know there are many more books yet to read. But rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel, I instead find myself with the opposite problem: with so many good books to read, which do I tackle next?

NPR has the answer. This summer, they invited readers and listeners to submit their favorite fantasy and science-fiction novels for consideration as the best of all time. Five-thousand submissions, 60,000 votes, and 237 semi-finalists later, they presented the final list of the top one-hundred books (and on a single, unpaginated page, at that!).

Of the top ten books, I've read six; I'm embarrassed to say it was only half that before adding the titles I earlier listed. Altogether, only 23% of the books have crossed my reading list. I still have much work to do. But how to choose from the remaining 77, other than haphazardly?

Unsurprisingly, geeks who like fantasy, sci-fi, and NPR also like flowcharts. SFSignal.com has created a comprehensive visual guide to selecting your next novel. By asking yourself some simple questions, such as "Enjoy quests to prevent great evil from conquering the world?" or "Robots or martians?", you can quickly lead yourself to the genre, topic, series, or allegory of your liking.

Using this flowchart, I've determined that my next three sci-fi novels should be Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End; in the fantasy realm, I'll be looking at T.H. White's The Once and Future King, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mrs. Norrell. At least one book in each genre is already in my personal library, sitting in my "to-read" pile for years now. That seems as good a place to start as any.

What sci-fi and fantasy novels are on your list?

(Hat tips to Michele and Barbara)

First I looked at LibraryThing, recommended to me by a librarian. Although its online tour presented a visually attractive interface, I eliminated LibraryThing as a potential contender almost immediately upon reading this caveat: "A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books." Anyone with a sufficiently extensive collection that warrants indexing likely has more than 200 books. Since mine is in excess of 600, I chose not to join this community of 1.2 million readers.

By contrast, Shelfari is free and features a bookshelf that looks similar to the one on my computer. It's owned by Amazon.com and integrates with one's purchases there, which ostensibly is a benefit, but I actually don't prefer consolidation — Amazon.com is a store, not a social network, and I'd like to keep those needs distinct. Otherwise, I'd likely just use Amazon.com's own media library service.

One online service I did not investigate was aNobii. bookarmy, closed in December 2010, was also not a contender.

Ultimately, I chose Goodreads, which was founded in October 2006 (two months after Shelfari) and has 4.4 million members. Being one of the older and larger online book cataloging services, it seemed more likely to offer an extensive member and book database for me to exploit. Goodreads also provides a widget that I can easily embed into Wordbits.net to dynamically inform visitors what I'm currently reading.

Exporting my library out of my Mac software and into Goodreads was simple but required editing the CSV file's headers from the former's "Creator" to the latter's "Author" and the like. Even then, Goodreads did not acknowledge all metadata made available to it: importation of whether or not I owned a copy of the book, as well as when and where it was purchased, is not supported, even though that same metadata is included in an export out of Goodreads. I had to manually edit batches of my books to identify which I owned (ie, all of them). But since books can exist in my Goodreads collection without me actually owning them, Goodreads thus becomes practical as a list not just of my books, but of any books that I want to read or purchase, or books that I have read without having purchased (courtesy my local public library).

Goodreads has a couple other quirks. For example, it's not immediately obvious how to move a book among the mutually exclusive "To Read", "Currently Reading", and "Read" shelves. Simply removing it from its current shelf won't do; it must instead be added to one of the other two.

But that's a result of Goodreads being used not just for static metadata, like my local index, but also for dynamic content. I can mark when I started reading a book, how far I've progressed each day, when I finished, and what I thought of it when I was done. Each of these updates can be put into a newsfeed for your friends can see and comment on — though, despite its large audience, very few people I know are on the service, which limits its usefulness.

I don't know if I would find myself with more friends if Goodreads tried harder to be more like Facebook, but I'm glad it doesn't. In its discussion groups have been requests for half-star ratings and thumbs up/down on individual comments, both of which have been flatly denied. Neither of those features would encourage the sort of intelligent and literary discourse that will help me find and interpret books, and I'm glad to leave them to other social networks to implement. (That said, the Goodreads application for Facebook seems quite popular.)

I haven't yet found a ton of value in publishing my catalog to Goodreads, though once I start rating more of my books, it may help me find similar books to read — a problem I've never had, as indicated by the 132 entries on my "to-read" shelf! But as a social complement to my own inventory tracking software, I find Goodreads an effective and free service, and one I hope more of my friends will join me on.

I'd already compiled a similar catalog of my DVDs using the Macintosh program Delicious Library. It was a project that had to wait until I had a computer with an inbuilt webcam, as then I could hold my DVD cases up to the monitor and have their barcodes scanned, downloading all their metadata from Amazon.com. It didn't take long to scan all 200 movies or so.

But books are a different matter: they're larger, bulkier, and sometimes more fragile. It seemed too laborious to lug my laptop to each shelf of books (or to carry each book to my computer desk) and scan the titles individually.

I decided to get a handheld barcode scanner. Delicious Library supports Bluetooth devices and recommends (and sells) the Microvision RoV scanner, which costs hundreds of dollars. I opted instead for a secondhand Microvision Flic scanner off eBay, which proved to be a mistake. Although the scanner paired with my MacBook just fine and emitted the expected red light and beeped in recognition of a barcode, it never transmitted that data back to the computer, indicating a wasted purchase. Faced with that defeat, my project stalled.

But a pending move threatens those books with storage, and I wanted to know what I'd collected before they went out of sight. I finally caved and went about the scanning process the cumbersome way.

The part of the process that was least curmudgeonly was the software. Delicious Library recognized the barcodes easily and spoke their names as it downloaded their information. If I accidentally scanned something twice, it pulled up the existing entry rather than make a new one.

There were a few special cases that required manual entry. Some books didn't list their ISBNs at all, so I went searching on Amazon.com or Google for that data. And many older paperbacks have barcodes on their back covers that scan incorrectly; the right barcode is on the inside front cover.

Altogether, indexing just over 600 books took less time than I'd spent trying to get the Bluetooth scanner working. Many of those books had their original receipts tucked inside, so I later added the purchase date, place, and price to my digital metadata. This second pass was more tedious than the first, requiring as it did no scanning, just data entry.

A sampling of my actual shelf, represented virtually.

The result is an exhaustive and beautiful virtual bookshelf that catalogs my collection. With the trend toward e-books, this database of metadata only, without the books' actual contents, may seem antiquated — but I find it to be the best of both worlds.

Perhaps that limitation is founded not in pessimism, but realism. With the conclusion of NaNoWriMo only a day behind us, I can't help but wonder how many aspiring novels are having this conversation today:

(Hat tip to Dayton Ward)

A few words seem redundant and unnecessary. For example, why do we need eggcorn — "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing or misinterpretation of another, an element of the original being substituted for one that sounds very similar or identical" — when we already have mondegreen — "a word or phrase resulting from a misinterpretation of a word or phrase that has been heard"? And why are so many acronyms, like BFF (best friends forever), LMAO (laughing my ass off), and TTYL (talk to you later), becoming words in their own right, when their definitions are the very words they represent?

But more disturbing is the recognition of made-up words that are closely associated with specific online services. You're unlikely to find "tweet" and "hashtag" outside Twitter, or "unfriend", "defriend", and "poke" (meaning "to attract the attention of (another member of the site) by using its 'poke' facility") elsewhere but Facebook — well, these places and the next Oxford English Dictionary, apparently.

I'm worried that these additions represent current trends and fads that have not stood the test of time. Internet memes are not words. Words have lasting power; memes do not. In a decade, will we still be tweeting and unfriending? If these concepts are words, then why not "lolcat", "fail", "pwn", or "teabag"? Perhaps as a historical document, the dictionary serves a valuable purpose of decrypting today's communications for future generations, but these terms have not yet made it into general usage.

I respect that the Interweb (it's a word — look it up!) is a powerful and practical aspect of daily life. But words that have application within a specific and proprietary context should not yet have earned their way into our lexicon.

What do you think? Am I too draconian in my desired growth of the English language? Or should the vocabulary of social media become our own?

Two common mistakes occur around DST, with the first not being unique to it. An extra 's' likes to appear at the end of certain words: going forwards, leaping backwards, moving towards. In all these instances, the last letter is extraneous and can be dropped without sacrificing meaning. The same goes for Daylight Savings Time. In this context, "saving" is an adjective describing "time", not a noun unto itself.

The second error is far more egregious as, unlike a superfluous 's', it can actually obfuscate meaning. When specifying an hour, standard time is sometimes used where daylight saving time would be correct. Since 2007 in the United States, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November. DST is therefore in effect the majority of the year. During these months, the correct way to indicate 6:00 PM on the East Coast, for example, is 6:00 PM EDT, or Eastern Daylight Time — not EST. 6:00 PM EST is in fact 7:00 PM EDT, and your audience may do this mental gymnastic only to find themselves an hour late for to presentation.

An academic difference? Hardly. In May 2000, Sega invited me to a teleconference that they said would be held at 1:00 PM EST, even though at that point in the year, daylight saving time was clearly in effect. I assumed their acronym to be in error and so dialed into the conference at 1:00 PM EDT. Sure enough, their public relations reps were on the line and ready to break their news.

I got off the phone a half-hour later and called a fellow journalist to share what I'd learned. He was baffled: "What teleconference? The call isn't until 2:00 PM. Maybe you're just confused and are mistaking some rumors you read online for the conference?" He and several others had taken the EST timestamp to heart, and the Sega reps had to play a recording of their conference an hour after it was held for all the latecomers.

Rarely are my efforts to point out this error understood. When a director told me that his movie will be on television at 6:00 PM EST, I asked him, "EST or EDT?" He failed to clarify the matter when he wrote back, "Eastern." Others, not understanding what EDT means, stubbornly insist EST.

If you can't be correct, then be vague. Can't remember what the acronyms mean, or which one goes with what time of year? Use neither. Just say "Eastern", and your readers will understand you to mean whatever the hour currently is in that time zone.

We know how to prevent the heartache of DST; follow these simple tips to avoid the headache as well.

Historically, I have engaged in similar activities: if I owned a video game, I considered it reasonable for me to acquire the soundtrack to said game, regardless of the means. Sometimes this meant connecting my PlayStation's audio output to my computer's input and making my own recording; other times, it was copying the album that had been released as a separate product. Video games have since adapted to such exploitation with copyrights that individually name the art, design, programming, and music, which would seem to deny any legal basis for my youthful actions.

Moreover, a game's soundtrack provides a unique experience within and without the context of the game, just as a book is different from an e-book. In a game, music is used to complement the on-screen action, whereas separately, it may be used without requiring gameplay to invoke its own imagery. Similarly, a book has a look, touch, and feel all its own, while an e-book is portable, markable, and potentially more transportable. To argue that buying one grants a license to a union of these benefits is dubious.

My response to Mr. Seglin's question was quoted in his follow-up:

I think it's fair to create your own translation of a product you own for personal use — such as scanning a book to put on your Kindle, or digitizing a CD to load onto your iPod.

To enjoy the fruits of someone else's translation efforts means making the investment in their version of that product. To do otherwise is still piracy.

I may not find it ethical for a consumer to steal something they already own in a different format — but to end the discussion there ignores the other party in the transaction. Is it ethical for the corporation to expect consumers to pay twice for the same content? If it were possible to provide proof of purchase, surely a discount for existing customers would be both respectful of their patronage as well as an incentive toward future business, as software developers do when offering upgrades to new versions. When dealing with more physical products, such a policy could more easily be implemented in small contexts, such as when the developer and distributor of said product are one in the same. As an example, Jason Scott's GET LAMP documentary comes with an upgrade guarantee:

What drives me absolutely nuts is buying the same film multiple times.

What I'm talking about is you buy a DVD of something, and you enjoy it. Then they come out with a special edition of the same thing and you buy it again. Then there's a downloadable version, and you buy that. And so on. And so on. It makes some people very rich, but it's just a completely disrespectful thing to do to the people who brought you success in the first place. It sucks.

So here's what I am doing.

I GUARANTEE THAT IF YOU BUY THE GET LAMP DVD ONLINE THROUGH THIS SITE, ANY FUTURE EDITIONS OF GET LAMP WILL BE AVAILABLE TO YOU AT COST OR CLOSE TO COST.

It is the right of Mr. Scott as the copyright holder of GET LAMP to determine the availability and value of his product (which is why he chooses to release it under Creative Commons). As Mr. Scott told me in an interview for Computerworld, "You've already paid me, I've already made a profit off you — I don't want to make another profit off you!" It is a generous (and perhaps expensive) approach he has chosen that could be considered the opposite extreme of corporations that charge the full amount for content that is improved but not new. A balance between the two could prove lucrative for all parties.

Like me, Mr. Seglin is not a lawyer, and his column looks at issues from an ethical, not legal or political, perspective. It's a useful prompt for us to look beyond the law and more rigorously examine how our own philosophies concur or disagree with society's external guidelines.