I’ve just finished reworking my story, “The Clockworks of Hanyang.” (Yay!) It’s one of those stories where it explodes in your mind in one form, gets reworked in another form, and neither of the two are really appropriate to the final form of the story. Some stories are like that — like bread dough, the demand to be kneaded and kneaded and bloody well kneaded. I’m pretty happy with how it’s come out at the moment, though I’ll need to set it aside for a day or two (no more than that) to see what I think of the changes …
Month: May 2011
Review: Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia by Francis Wheen
Disclosure: I got an ARC of this book for free through the Librarything Early Readers program. (Am I endorsing ABBA? No… but this is a book about the 70s, and mentions this performance specifically. It weirds me out that this performance was something like a month after I was born… so amateur, and yet, somehow it annoys me less than, say, Lady Gaga or whatever else young people listen to bob their heads to now. Yes, yes, I’m sure it’s just childhood exposure.) The title says it all: I knew Philip K. Dick was a big paranoiac back in the …
Links of Interest
I’m about to go judge a public speaking contest, but I wanted to note these links: World War II London Blitz Diary 1939-1945: someone is posting Great-Grandmother Ruby Thompson’s diary from during the Blitz in London. Very cool reading, interesting and, you know, detailed in ways that are worthy of note to people researching the time. (I found the link helping a student find resources for WWII London life, for a story she’s writing.) This post on the Women’s History Network Blog has a neat discussion of “Career Novels in the 1950s” — a kind of juvenile-oriented novel for girls …
Forthcoming Papers on Korean SF, “Good Night,” and a Summary of “Another Undiscovered Country”
Well, I have submitted the final corrected version of my paper on Korean SF films in the 21st century to Acta Koreana: it’s been approved for publication, pending those edits, so I figure that’s one more paper in the can, to bring my current total of pending academic publications to two: “Politics, Ecology on the Korean Left: Anti-Americanism and Environmental Dystopia in The Host” supposedly forthcoming in the Arena Journal. “Another Undiscovered Country: Culture and the Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in 21st-Century South Korean Cinema,” which if all goes well should be appearing in Acta Koreana sometime …
HP Lovecraft and the (Monkey) Puzzle of the “Good Lovecraftian Film”
I was talking with my friend Chris about a bunch of SF- (and, to a lesser degree, fantasy-) -related things the other day — one of those discussions where you are trying to get at the heart of how we read genre and why, reader/viewer expectations for genre texts and media, and so on. One of the interesting points that came up was how it’s so difficult to make a good Lovecraftian film, and the fact that people keep trying and trying. This has stuck out in my mind as a question to myself, since for a few months now …