Wednesday, June 23, 2010Campbell shortlist, plus news from Titan

I was delighted to learn that Julian Comstock is short-listed for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, along with a bunch of other worthy novels (the complete list is here).  I won this award once before, for The Chronoliths -- or rather, I co-won it; the prize was split between my book and Jack Williamson's Terraforming Earth, which only made it better, from my point of view.  One of the first books I ever bought With My Own Money was Williamson's The Trial of Terra.  The late Jack Williamson published his first story in 1928 and was still writing at the time of his death in 2006.  He was too frail to attend the award ceremony, alas; I would have loved to have met him.

A few Canadian news sources have noticed that there are four Canadians among this year's finalists, for whatever that's worth, the other three being Cory Doctorow, Robert J. Sawyer and Margaret Atwood. 

"Cory Doctorow, Robert J. Sawyer and Margaret Atwood walk into a bar . . ."  Unfortunately I don't have a joke to go with that.  If you think of one, let me know.

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Some peculiar chemistry has been detected on Titan: see this news item, for instance.  It's always interesting how reluctant scientists are to raise the possibility of life on another world, and how eager science journalists are to pick up on even the slightest hint.  Given that the temperature at the surface of Titan is roughly –179 degrees Celcius (–290 degrees Fahrenheit), anything living there would have to be a fairly hardy specimen.  Something bacterial, I suppose -- those little buggers get in everywhere.

Probably it's just some unexpected catalytic chemical process happening at the surface, however.  Given a choice between two hypotheses, the least glamorous one is more likely to be true:  Wilson's Law.