But naturally...

Of course. And one need never go to bookstores again...

A brilliant near-future story by one of my favourite writers, Linda Nagata, is available—free—here (the first piece of e-fiction to have won Nebula award), a good introduction to Nagata's work: and of course, you must read her nanotech novels.

Speaking of which, last time I was at Powell's, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up my third copy (the first two were given away a long time ago) of Deception Well, among other books, and had a chance to reflect on the fact that all of the half-dozen or so science fiction paperbacks I was getting were written by women. Coincidence? Actually, I don't think so: yet another field—traditionally male—being transformed and enhanced. Of course, there always were women in SF publishing—according to some accounts, the genre originated with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—but they always were a minority and tending to work within fantasy rather than science fiction proper before the last 10 years or so. Not anymore: women are giving us 80% of quality, literary science fiction now. (Someday soon I'll make a list of links for y'all). For another facet of the story, one also quite dear to my geeky empirico-deductive little heart, check out Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics.

PS: Now that I've ordered my signed copies of Nagata's books, some lucky person will inherit my current copies...they are all out of print, but not impossible to find.