The Age of Ice is on the Locus magazine 2013 reading list and on the Ballot

I am very happy to announce that my novel The Age of Ice has made the  Locus Magazine's 2013 recommended reading list in the First Novels category!
And not only that, it is also included in the ballot. If you read the novel and enjoyed it, please take a moment  to go to the Poll and do some voting.

Thanks!

A review of Karen Joy Fowler's novel We are all completely beside ourselves

There are books that tell stories that could have happened. And then there are books that make you yearn that the story they tell, however fantastic, had in fact happened — as if without it, without these particular events and without this human being who’d experienced them and now tells her tale, there is something amiss in the world. The only disbelief you suspend is the one where you can’t believe you’ll never meet this character in your real life.

Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel is one of such books. Written as a memoir and filled with references to actual events and facts, the story balances on the verge of “happened” just as the narrator, Rosemary, balances on the verge of a grand disclosure that will expose her as she is, with all her idiosyncrasies, to the whole world.

In a nutshell, the novel imagines the fate of one of the experiments actually performed around nineteen seventies (if I am not mistaken) in the US, and pursuing comparative analysis of human and primate development. In such an experiment, a human and an ape infant are reared together from the very early age on, they are treated in the same way, as if both are human; they know each other intimately, they communicate with each other using sign language. It is researchers’ hypothesis that the ape child may be advanced, behaviorally, closer to the level of a human child. It was the actual outcome, at least in some cases, that the human child began to acquire behavioral traits more reminiscent of an ape. Rosemary Cooke, the heroine and the narrator of the novel is one of such children. She spent the first five years of her life with a sister who happened to be a chimpanzee.

ART+SCIENCE Salon

This coming Thursday, November 21 (6-8PM) I will be participating in a panel discussion on Intersections between literature and science  at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Guest-blogging at upcoming4.me

 My recent guest blog post for Upcoming4.me  details some of the story behind writing and researching The Age of Ice:

Memories of Ice
The Age of Ice started about six years ago, with me reading The New Yorker article by Elif Batuman, The Ice Renaissance. The article discussed two episodes in Russian history separated by two hundred and sixty six years. One — the building in the winter of 1740, upon the order of the empress Anna Ioannovna, of a palace made entirely of ice, where two of the empress’s jesters were forced to spend their wedding night. The other episode — building of a replica of that palace on the same site in the winter of 2006, and its popularity with St. Petersburg’s denizens.
Read the full post here: Upcoming4.me

A book reading in Bellingham, WA

I will be reading and signing The Age of Ice on October 18 in Village Books in Bellingham.  Starts at 7:00 PM. 

I agree

with this article in HuffPost

Sequestration ushers in a dark age for science in America


It is  a detailed, accurate account of today's state of affairs in biomedical sciences: 

A Zeno's paradox and a brinicle video

Will the warship outrun the sailboat?

I took this pic during my off time at San Diego's waterfront. I am back from trips to LA, San Diego, and Portland where I was reading from, rambling about, and scribbling on The Age of Ice. Thank you all who came to listen to me. I hope you had a good time!
Something I mentioned at the readings -- a video of a "brinicle," a.k.a. an ice finger of death. Make sure you watch till the end, where it is the most icy and deadly. Here is the link: An Ice Finger of Death