OMNI Reboot

Remember OMNI magazine? The one with the vvvveerrrryyyy late 70’s computer age affectation font used in its logo:

omni-logo

I think I mostly encountered this magazine in the dusty corners of some of the more nebbish teachers’ classrooms in junior high (that’s middle school to you whippersnappers). I didn’t read it much then. I don’t even know why because it seems to have been exactly square in the middle of what would pique my interest. Perhaps it was too sciency and not enough fantasy for my liking. At any rate, it was reportedly one heck of a rag in its day. I think it was mothballed in the late 1990’s but can’t be arsed to Wikipedia up an answer.

Side note: can we use wikipedia as verb in the same way we use google? Because I tend to want to.

Right. So. The point of all of this is that about a month ago there was a “reboot” of OMNI as a web publication. You can read it here[1]. And, folks, let me tell you. It is freaking awesome! I’ve been loving it. It sits in my RSS reader and sends me goodness about once a day. In the event you were a fan of OMNI back in the day and/or enjoy the intersection of science, technology, culture, design, and fiction then I highly recommend you check it out.

[1] http://omnireboot.com/

The new phonebooks are here!

To say I’ve enjoyed the Wool1 saga by Hugh Howey is an understatement. It’s probably the best long-arc dystopian fiction I’ve ever read. For a kid coming of age in Reagan’s America, I had nightmares of how living in fallout shelters might work. The numbers of generations needed to outlive the half life of nuclear fallout was incomprehensible. At some point the math just doesn’t hold and everything has to collapse.

In the Wool saga, Howey puts a story and framework around these childhood fears and lets his characters play out in this world. It is gripping stuff and I devoured everything published. I came to the party relatively late so having most of the series already available was great. Waiting for these last few books to drop have been interminable.

Dust2 is the very last book in the series and it was made available this last weekend. If you’re short of reading material, like dystopian fiction, and have a little coin to throw around, you could do a lot worse than pick these up.

I should also add, Hugh Howey is a model for self publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but he managed to turnkey Amazon direct-to-Kindle printing into a multi-six-figure payout.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_%28series%29
2 http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Silo-Saga-ebook/dp/B00CYNGPTG