George R. R. Martin weighs in on the health care debate, providing some perspective on the horrific situation faced by freelance artists in America. Hundreds of comments to his blog ensued.

In a follow-up post he notes: “I find it telling that virtually ALL the posters from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries that have a single payer national health care service LIKE their national health plan, and would NOT trade it for the American model. Meanwhile, here in the US, we are clearly split right down the middle … Now I ask you: if there are two restaurants, one where 99% of the customers are satisfied and happy, and one where half the customers are happy and the other half profoundly unhappy with the food and service, which would you rather eat at?”

Here’s a really cool article about the Indian Rationalist Association: Skeptic Challenges Guru to Kill Him Live on TV. The article focuses on the organization’s president, Sanal Edamaruku.

From the article: His organisation traces its origins to the 1930s when the “Thinker’s Library” series of books, published by Britain’s Rationalist Press Association, were first imported to India. They included works by Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin and H.G. Wells; among the early subscribers was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

But since Mr Edamaruku took over in 1985, it has grown into a grass-roots organisation of more than 100,000 members — mainly young professionals, teachers and students — covering most of India. Members now spend much of their time investigating and reverse-engineering “miracles” performed by self-styled holy men who often claim millions of followers and amass huge wealth from donations.

The article goes into some detail about how many of these “miracles” are performed.

Finished a new 6,400 word short story, “The Ontological Factor,” a loving homage to Robert Asprin’s Myth series. Years ago John Joseph Adams and I had to sit around Grand Central Station for a few hours waiting for someone, and in the course of that long conversation we discovered that we’re both big fans of the Myth books, and he suggested I should write something in that style. I loved the idea, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, but was never able to come up with a good approach to the material. I went back to it after Asprin’s death in 2008, because I thought it would be a nice tribute to the man who had been my favorite author during my childhood, and I spent quite a bit of time developing a concept, but in the end I just wasn’t thrilled with it and moved on to other things. Late last year I finally came up with what I think is a terrific new twist on the idea of dimension-hopping adventurers, but I was too busy with other stuff to actually write it, and that probably ended up being for the best, because working out all the logical implications of the idea turned out to be fiendishly complicated, and even after I’d spent four or five months plotting it out in my head I still stalled when I tried to actually write it, because things I hadn’t considered kept cropping up. In one of his forewards, Asprin, who was famously afflicted with writer’s block, declared, “These books just look spontaneous and easy to write. Honest!”, and I now have much greater appreciation for the truth of this. Anyway, the story is finally done, and I’m really, really pleased with how it turned out.

Wow. Here’s an absolutely fascinating article about the dilemmas faced by religious leaders who no longer believe in the doctrines of their churches, featuring anonymous and candid interviews with five such individuals: Preachers Who Are Not Believers

A sample: What gives them this impression that they are far from alone, and how did this strange and sorrowful state of affairs arise? The answer seems to lie in the seminary experience shared by all our pastors, liberals and literals alike. Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God. It is interesting that all our pastors report the same pattern of response among their fellow students: some were fascinated, but others angrily rejected what their professors tried to teach them. Whatever their initial response to these unsettling revelations, the cat was out of the bag and both liberals and literals discerned the need to conceal their knowledge about the history of Christianity from their congregations.

Wow. You have got to listen to Rick Kleffel’s 2009 interview with Dan Simmons regarding Simmons’ novel Drood. The interview concerns Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins, author of the The Moonstone, the grandfather of all detective novels. It also concerns Collins’ staggering drug habit, his lifelong belief that he had a doppelganger (whom he believed had written all his best material), the race to invent the detective novel, Dickens’ public readings that were so powerful they were guaranteed to cause a dozen women in the audience to faint, and his belief that mesmerism is what allowed him to accomplish this, and also the horrifying train accident that killed everyone except aboard except Dickens, his mistress, and her mother, and the endless mystery surrounding Dickens last, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Simmons believes would have cemented Dickens’ place as the grandfather of the detective novel in place of Collins. (Simmons also talks about how Drood will be the next movie directed by Guillermo del Toro after he finishes The Hobbit.) One of the most amazing interviews I’ve ever heard. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

The deadline for the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard is at the end of this month, so if anyone’s written any good wizard stories recently, make sure to send them in ASAP. Here are the guidelines.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Holly Black tomorrow afternoon, so if anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask her, feel free to suggest them.

So someone just stuck this to my mailbox:

Jonh Joseph Adams reports that he’s turned in the final manuscript for The Living Dead 2, which includes my story “The Skull-Faced City.” Here’s the cover copy and table of contents:

Two years ago, readers eagerly devoured The Living Dead. Publisher’s Weekly named it one of the Best Books of the Year, and Barnes & Noble.com called it “The best zombie fiction collection ever.” Now acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams is back for another bite at the apple — the Adam’s apple, that is — with 43 more of the best, most chilling, most thrilling zombie stories anywhere, including virtuoso performances by zombie fiction legends Max Brooks (World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide), Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), and David Wellington (Monster Island).

The Living Dead 2 has more of what zombie fans hunger for — more scares, more action, more … brains. Experience the indispensable series that defines the very best in zombie literature.

* Introduction — John Joseph Adams
* Alone, Together — Robert Kirkman
* Danger Word — Steven Barnes & Tananarive Due
* Zombieville — Paula Stiles
* The Anteroom — Adam-Troy Castro
* When the Zombies Win — Karina Sumner-Smith
* Mouja — Matt London
* Category Five — Marc Paoletti
* Living with the Dead — Molly Brown
* Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco — Seth Lindberg
* The Mexican Bus — Walter Greatshell
* The Other Side — Jamie Lackey
* Where the Heart Was — David J. Schow
* Good People — David Wellington
* Lost Canyon of the Dead — Brian Keene
* Pirates vs. Zombies — Amelia Beamer
* The Crocodiles — Steven Popkes
* The Skull-Faced City — David Barr Kirtley
* Obedience — Brenna Yvanoff
* Steve and Fred — Max Brooks
* The Rapeworm — Charlie Finlay
* Everglades — Mira Grant
* We Now Pause For Station Identification — Gary Braunbeck
* Reluctance — Cherie Priest
* Arlene Schabowski Of The Undead — Mark McLaughlin & Kyra M. Schon
* Zombie Gigolo — S. G. Browne
* Rural Dead — Bret Hammond
* The Summer Place — Bob Fingerman
* The Wrong Grave — Kelly Link
* The Human Race — Scott Edelman
* Who We Used to Be — David Moody
* Therapeutic Intervention — Rory Harper
* He Said, Laughing — Simon R. Green
* Last Stand — Kelley Armstrong
* The Thought War — Paul McAuley
* Dating in Dead World — Joe McKinney
* Flotsam & Jetsam — Carrie Ryan
* Thin Them Out — Kim Paffenroth, Julia Sevin & RJ Sevin
* Zombie Season — Catherine MacLeod
* Tameshigiri — Steven Gould
* Zero Tolerance — Jonathan Maberry
* And the Next, and the Next — Genevieve Valentine
* The Price of a Slice — John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow
* Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven? — Sarah Langan

Lightspeed Magazine has announced the lineup for their debut issue:

I hope everyone saw this article: Stand Up While You Read This

Here’s the gist of it:

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

I hate sitting, in general, and I loathe situations where I have to sit still for hours on end: airplanes, long movies, fancy restaurants, etc. I’m always standing/pacing, and people are constantly telling me to act like a normal person and sit down. Well read it and weep, sitting people, you’re all gonna die, bwahahahaha!

Winter is coming … to HBO! The pilot apparently looks good, and the network has committed to producing 10 episodes. Of course you can never tell how these things are going to turn out, but a Song of Ice and Fire show that’s similar in quality to HBO’s Rome would really be something. Here’s the first image they’ve released, from the opening scene:

Via Irene Gallo on Tor.com, check out Michael Whelan’s cover art for Brandon Sanderson’s new novel The Way of Kings.

Dammit. Just saw on Bill Shunn’s blog that Ryan Maguire’s Ale House has been destroyed in a fire. For years this is where we’d all head after the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series to enjoy the food, conversation, and waitresses with nigh-incomprehensible Irish accents.

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast will be interviewing the Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen, so if you have any Tolkien-related questions or topics you’d like to suggest, feel free. Here’s an interesting tidbit from the latest episode of the Tolkien Professor podcast:

Please keep in mind I am not asking for a “tragic flaw.” The phrase “tragic flaw” is one of several phrases I would eliminate from the whole sphere of English classes and literary analysis if I could. It is a misleading concept which almost always leads to oversimplification — based upon, by the way, a complete mistranslation of a passage from Aristotle. The Greek word that Aristotle uses to describe that thing that tragic heroes have is hamartia, which means “error in judgment” or “mistake.” Somebody does something they knew they weren’t supposed to do. One of Oedipus’s great hamartia is killing his dad at the crossroads — that was an error in judgment. So I’m not looking for “tragic flaws.” Human beings are a little more complicated than that, and so are most characters.

See also Hamartia at Wikipedia.

Saw an ad for this in Realms of Fantasy. Don’t know anything about the book, but the cover cracks me up.

One of my favorite contemporary artists is Camille Rose Garcia, who’s just illustrated a new version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Wow, here’s a job I’m actually qualified for: