The Hugo Award Nominees for 2006 have been annouced, including Blindsight by Canadian Peter Watts. Boy does the official Hugo site suck. Why, for example, isn’t the press release announcing the nominees front-and-centre?

Ryley mentioned to me that Blindsight is available online, so I’m reading it now. There’s some great content on the site (Jared points, for example, to the quote burning Margaret Atwood). Don’t miss this presentation-spoof about the biological discovery and commericalization of vampires. Note the nerdcore — a proposed classification for vampires is “homo sapiens whedonum“.

“[...] It is for Donny, and for all the other children of the world, that our first commercial batch of vampires is gestating even as we speak.

We anticipate FDA approval within the month, and if that doesn’t happen, a number of third-world countries have already expressed interest in hosting our research in very favourable tax and regulatory environments.”

I’ll be looking for the other nominees online. Charile Stross doesn’t like giving things away, even though that’s what his books are largely about (he’s apparently a for-profit revolutionary). The other authors seem too mainstream to have heard of Creative Commons. We’ll see how it works out.

If you put your book in a library, why not just put it online? Because you make bank off the library’s distribution bottleneck? Weak. Dams in the infostream tend to burst, it’s just bad business, jump before you’re pushed, etc.

Canada has become a haven for High-Tech and Sci-Fi (they tend to go hand-in-hand). Go Canada Go!