Last month, when we wrote about the reasons chain bookstores reject books from major publishers, science fiction author Tobias Buckell brought some valuable perspective to the issue, noting that individual Borders employees were frustrated at the corporate decision not to stock his latest hardcover, Sly Mongoose. (We didn't mention it at the time, but it's awfully good—cloud cities, dreadlocked killing machines, a seemingly unstoppable wave of space zombies... this book's got it all; see for yourself, in a huge downloadable free excerpt. We read it all in a single weekend, stopping only to eat, sleep, and...well, no, we kept reading during that other thing, actually.)

Yesterday, though, Buckell's 300-plus Twitter followers were shocked to hear that he'd wound up in the emergency room due to an accelerated heart beat and shallow breath. "Heart attack at 29? WTF?" he wondered. After some hours, the cardiologist is considering other options, and Buckell's already cracking nerd jokes about how "we can rebuild him." We do have to confess: A better, faster, stronger Buckell would keep us from having to wait entire years between his subsequent books. But mostly we're just hoping for good news soon!