Eureka's 4th

Does anybody know when the 4th season of Eureka will begin or even if there will be a 4th season? The lack of of advertising on the SciFi Channel's site does not bode well.

It's true that I didn't enjoy the previous season as much as the previous two, as it lacked the previous two's sense of joy, but I still want my summer dose of mad science!

Say, do you have a favorite episode?

elizabethan space operas, people that don't exist, and elvish dildos

I finished Asimov’s April/May 2009 issue yesterday. If you remember this entry, where I expressed some annoyance toward Norman Spinrad, you too have realized it took me 2 weeks to finish the magazine. It’s not like the stories were an arduous lot to read. I’d been busy with gardening many evenings after long days at the office, which means that, when I could finally sit down, I’d find myself nodding off quite a bit. Anyway. I’m quite happy that, after 2 or 3 issues where I couldn’t find a single story that I truly and fully (or nearly so) enjoyed, I discovered 3 such stories here.

Robert Reed’s “True Fame” is about a future a few decades away, one where you can easily dredge up information about any stranger that you encounter, thanks to all the bits and pieces of ourselves that we’ve been littering cyberspace with. Then,one day, the narrator and his companion come across a man about whom they can’t find anything. Not a thing, as if that person didn’t exist. I’m not sure I’m happy with how the story ended, but it drew me in until then.

Brian Stableford's alternate History of "The Great Armada" suffered from being populated with too many characters, each of them is a famous historical figure. That didn’t keep them from blending into persons nearly indistinguishable from each other, but, for some reason, I never even considered giving up. In fact, this tale suitably wrapped up a series that could best be described as an Elizabethan space opera – even though Jane is Queen.

My favorite story was “The Armies of Elfland”, by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick. I was amused by its mentionning a godemiché. I mean, it's not every day that I come across a fantasy story that uses the French word for dildo - at least not in this kind of fantasy. That being said, this tale is anything but amusing, as it depicts our world after it has been destroyed by elven armies that came from Elsewhere, keeping alive only a few children, and killing everyone else in horrible ways.

The children understood cruelty far more intimately than did the adults, who had the army and the police and a hundred other social institutions to protect them from schoolyard beatings, casual thefts, and having bugs and other vermin dropped into one’s food or mouth or clothing simply because somebody bigger was bored. What shocked them was not the deeds in themselves – they had imagined far worse – but that nobody took pleasure from them.

Harrowing, yes,
Recommended, yes.