Faster than a speeding photon

I'm just home from a trip to California -- at no point traveling at anywhere near the pace suggested by the subject line. I went for SFWA's annual Nebula Awards. (This year's Nebula winners here, courtesy of SFScope.)

I wasn't in the running this cycle for a Nebula, but I am delighted to have come home with a different award.

Regular visitors here at SF and Nonsense will remember that I write frequently for Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Mostly those Analog appearances are fiction, but (as befits a physicist and computer engineer with thirty years experience in IT and aerospace) I also sometimes contribute science and technology articles.

In the Analog Readers Poll for 2011, I came in second place -- tied with myself! -- for best fact article. Those runner-up pieces were for "Lost in Space? Follow the Money" (about the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet and the dawning era of commercialized spaceflight) and “Say What? Ruminations About Language, Communications, and Science Fiction” (a title that explains itself).

"Making Appearances Frequently In Analog"

For 2012, I'm pleased to say that in the fact-article category, my “Faster Than a Speeding Photon: The Why, Where, and (Perhaps the) How of Faster-Than-Light Technology" took first place in the readers poll. I suspect the scope of that article is pretty self-evident, too.

The reader awards (compiled separately for Analog and Asimov's) were presented during the Nebula Award weekend in a ceremony hosted by Dell (publisher of both magazines). For the full list of categories/winners, see the SF Signal report, "WINNERS: Analog’s AnLab Awards and Asimov’s Readers’ Awards."

If you're curious about my science and tech writing, six Analog fact articles, including "Faster Than a Speeding Photon" (and more than a dozen related short stories) are collected in Frontiers of Space, Time and Thought: Essays and Stories on The Big Questions.