On the subject, here’s a review of TLC at, which is nice and positive (although contains at least one minor spoiler): “I dare you to put the novel aside in the final 100 pages!” the review says, although without the exclamation mark, which I put in because I suspect that’s what Tor’s marketing folks will do once they get their hands on it. But yes - if you’ve been waiting for the book, it’s beginning to get out there. Jeff admits to positioning the book for maximum photogenics I have no problem with that so long as it remained face out, high shelf after he was done (the face-out Old Man’s War, I am told, was there already).

With five days to go before its official release, The Last Colony is beginning to slip out into the wild here it is at the Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, as photographed by Jeff Hentosz. Even when you’re not actually required by federal law not to delete them.

You really have to actively and affirmatively decide to delete mails once you’ve pulled them off a server and put them into a e-mail reader. Now, you may ask, why do I have nearly every single e-mail I’ve been sent in the last nine and a half years? Aside for the desire to pass on my hard drives to the University of Chicago archives after my death, because I’m absolutely certain future scholars will want to read all my e-mails from over the years trying to coordinate restaurant plans with my friends, it may be because one really has to go out of one’s way to delete them.

And I’m not actually required by federal law to keep a record. I don’t want to expend too much thought on what a lying sack of crap the White House is regarding all those missing e-mails of theirs, but let me just say this: I have in my personal possession about 60,000 e-mails dating all the way back to January 9, 1996, so if you’re a real live person and you’ve sent me e-mail since that date, the chances are pretty good I’ve got a record of it somewhere in my database (minus the occasional accidental deletion during a spam sweep).

Gift of the Unmage by Alma Alexander