The website for Adam Felber’s upcoming novel Schrödinger’s Ball has gone live. Adam is far and away my favorite of the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me regulars, and his blog, Fanatical Apathy, is a treat in its own right; I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with a longer work.

Something that baffles me, though, is the incredible lead time for the book. It sounds like it was complete a while ago; reviewers appear to have gotten their hands on it, or at least a close-to-final version of the manuscript. We ordinary mortals are going to have to wait until August to sink our teeth into it. In an age of internet-based instant gratification, that seems almost archaic. Maybe it’s just me.

The enigmatic Octavia E. Butler has left us, and before her time.

Science fiction was her home turf, but she’d have done any field she chose proud. She inhabited the uncanny valley: she had a knack for coming up with premises that could make your skin crawl, and then spinning them, credibly, into something ultimately life-affirming. Her work often had the quality of dreams about it, and by that I mean that it could be both wondrous and disturbing, sometimes in the same breath. But then, that stands to reason: she never flinched, and she never cheated, when it came to following where the story led. The world could use more like her.

She will be missed, and I will now read the recently-published Fledgling, the first new work of hers to appear in seven years, with a slightly heavier heart, knowing that it will — barring the discovery of some lost manuscript — be the last new thing to appear under her name.

Ave adque vale, Octavia. Dream well, as you always did.

A few weeks ago, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday ran an interview with Frank Warren, creator/proprietor of the PostSecret project.

It’s essentially an anonymous postcard confessional, with the most compelling submissions displayed on the site every week. Some are funny; some are haunting. One of the latter is one I haven’t seen yet, which Warren selected to read on the air:

“I’d give anything for the opportunity to show even the smallest kindness to my ex-wife.”

I’d like to see that one. I suspect that I’ll have to buy the book to do so. I can think of worse things.

But it and the one reproduced below seem like flip sides of the same coin. It’s strange how kindness can sometimes cut deeper than cruelty.

I have, since late May, been chugging my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, thanks in no small part to Jody‘s generosity in lending out chunks of her library. I’ve nearly caught up, but I’m jumping out of the sequence a bit right now, because the second-latest Discworld novel, Going Postal, has just come out in paperback.

Early Terry Pratchett is lighthearted fun, full of semi-disposable characters in ridiculous situations. Later Terry Pratchett… well, that’s something else again. The humor is as sharp as it ever was, but somewhere along the way, the characters stopped being mere puppets in service of the punch line, and started being the kind of people you find yourself caring about. Deeply. The result is magic — not the kind of flashy spellcasting that Pratchett’s wizards engage in, or are supposed to refrain from engaging in — but the kind that has you laughing, on one level, with almost every turn of the page, while on another it has you musing upon quite serious questions of right and wrong.

Up ’til now, Night Watch has been my favorite example of this tricky alloy, but Going Postal looks to equal if not exceed it. Moist von Lipwig is in some ways the perfect counterweight to Sam Vimes. Where the latter is a good, if gruff, man ever struggling to keep himself from crossing the line, the former is a bad, but charming, man trying desperately to claw his way across the line in the opposite direction.

I finished it this weekend; if I have any complaint about the book, it’s that it isn’t long enough. I could cheerfully have followed its characters for another few hundred pages at least. As it is, I can hope that Ankh-Morpork’s new Postmaster joins the lineup of regulars, and that we haven’t seen the last of him.