Pauline Barmby

All books from CMU Press | booksellers.ca | Purchase print books and eBooks online A network of over 100 bookstores, more than 500,000 print books or eBooks, unparalleled expertise. It is possible to buy local on the Web!

It's been a long time coming. Canadian independent bookstores have banded together to create an online book buying source so you can avoid the behemoth in the room. (Here are the titles published by CMU Press, which I run.)
Spread the word #booksky!

www.booksellers.ca/publisher/cmu-press-18021

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui: 9781645662143 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical, locked room...

Yup! And I think you’d like the book: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804740...

Off to @thesuiway.bsky.social’s book launch at @bakkaphoenix.bsky.social! So excite!

I did this last year and I'm trying to make it an annual Thing, so here are a few short fiction writers in their first two years of publishing worth considering for Astounding Award nomination! I'm highlighting a work I loved from each of them (it's hard to keep it to just one, but c'est la vie)

We’re wasting a ridiculous amount of money on this event, and now we put our justice on hold for it too? Nonsense.

HEY CANUCK SF AUTHORS! You have just 32hrs left to submit your 2025 SFF poetry & short fiction to Year's Best Canadian F&SF: Volume Four (best of 2025). We're already at a record 450+ subs--can we get to 500!?!? DO IT!! Make me regret my life choices! Link below! We close Feb 28 11:59pm Pacific!

Hooray!!!

A new space race could turn our atmosphere into a ‘crematorium for satellites’ Planned ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites could cause unforeseen harm to the ozone layer and climate systems. Global regulation is needed before it’s too late.

Excellent piece from @astrokiwi.bsky.social @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy & Laura Revell.

This one sentence is the crux of it all 👇

"There is no public mandate for a single company in one country to make changes on that scale to the planet’s atmosphere."

Highly recommended.

🔭🧪

🚨Don’t upload other people‘s intellectual property to Ai. 🚨

every moment happens once, just floating by wether we notice it or not. here and gone. it is up to us to grab these little slivers of time and see them and give them a nod. what a blessing it is to be given this chance. remember to take it when you can

A birth announcement for a book! Including the book cover, the size of the book (14 by 12) and weight of book (567 grams). There are faint, blue starts surrounding the book which is displayed against a light blue, watercolour background.

A.D. Sui (caucasian person with short, brown hair) is wearing a grey top coat and jeans, pointing to The Iron Garden Sutra on a bookstore bookshelf and smiling.

and we're live, folks!

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA is now out everywhere books are sold! if you pre-ordered a copy, you should be receiving it soon (or already have) and if not, it's not too late to purchase the yellowest book in all of history!

Congrats on your first pub! Hope it’s the first of many!

Last call to apply: 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee Programme There are only a few days left to apply for the 2026 Graduate Trainee positions at the European Space Agency. Applications close on 28 February 2026, so this is your final chance to submit your applic...

🚨 Last call to apply: 2026 ESA Graduate Trainee Programme!

Applications close on 28 February 2026, so this is your final chance to submit your application before the deadline! 👇

#ESArecruits

It me! (Also it is possible I’ve spent too much time on airplanes in the past year or two.)

Satellite proposals threaten the night sky In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan.
darksky.org/news/two-sat...

On Spec 129 features a cyborg whale. Works by Julie Czerneda, Marie Bennan, Cat Isidore, Alex Langer, Fiona Moore and more.

On Spec 134 features a druid on the cover. Works by Fiona Heath, Stephen Kotowych, Marie Labrousse, Ian Li and more.

We urge all our friends in the Worldcon community to consider nominating On Spec for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award, and to consider nominating Diane Walton for Best Editor - Short Form.

They've done great work for 35 years.

New blog post: hugoclub.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

It me! (Also it is possible I’ve spent too much time on airplanes in the past year or two.)

Students who didn’t want online ed could have taken time off; it’s not like we had that option.

Carl was Canadian: BSc UCalgary, MSc UVic, named to MacLean's Magazine Honour Roll 2006: "Thirty-Nine
Canadians Who Make the World a Better Place to Live In: Discoverers and Thinkers.” (From his 2010 CV.)

I crossed paths with him via Spitzer & star clusters. Always interested and curious.

Oh no. Thanks for sharing this.

YouTube video by CBC News These two women are trying every sport in the Winter Olympic Games

This is awesome. youtu.be/LtwjMsJoOZc?...

Calling all concept-driven science fiction short stories (and novelettes) published in 2025! I'm looking for bangers I might have missed that fit this brief: compellingsciencefiction.com/posts/call-f...

If you can share this with your favorite SF author/publisher/editor, I'd be grateful!

Currently hailing (or something like it) at my house in N London

I can’t believe you lefty Luddites hate tech so much that you embrace mRNA vaccines, heat pumps, electric bikes, hybrid work, renewable power (and awesome advancements in storage), space telescopes, and hot/cold running water but reject the planet destroying plagiarism enrich the worst people bots!

One week until the release of Iron Garden Sutra by @thesuiway.bsky.social ! Don’t sleep on this one. Intergalactic funeral rites monk enters a long lost ship to perform post mortem rites for the dead. But, oops, something eerie is happening on this ship. I was glued to the page. 🖤

#booksky 💙📚🪐📚🩸

I love (I do not) how my junk folder is half this stuff & half ‘lovely ladies are waiting for you’.

Dear Mr. Nadeau: As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness. Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out. Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day. Sincerely, E. B. White

I just stumbled across this and thought some of you might like to see it. A letter from E.B. White to a man who'd written he'd lost all hope:

The Tumbler Ridge newspaper puts it better than I could

Gang.

GANG.

LLM DETECTORS ARE ALSO LLMs AND PRONE TO THE EXACT SAME ERRORS.

STOP USING THEM.