If I ever were to write an autobiographical account of my life in Korea, or a chapter on the same in a bigger autobiographical text (other than this blog), I would want to have all of the humor of the first twelve pages or so of Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh. That’s all I’ve read, but I’m sure the rest is funny too. Other Westerners I know have much better first-day-in-Korea stories than I do. One guy I know ended up on the bus to a totally different city, but, if I remember it right, didn’t know he was …
Category: WRITING
Sarging Rasmussen excerpt online
For those interested in my story “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic,” which is appearing in the Shine anthology, there’s an excerpt online. Yup, the story is what you might think it is from the excerpt: Pick-Up Artists meet the Green Movement meet the UN, basically. If you like it, there’s a huge pile of preorder links right there in the sidebar of the same page.
Shiny!
oh my word, these pages, full of stars: how they Shine! The stars to which I refer are, of course, bright and shiny ideas about this future we’re tumbling toward, and not the authors, of which I am one. Just got my contributors’ copies of Shine, the new anthology of optimistic SF edited by Jetse de Vries that Amazon says is coming out on March 30th. I’ve only read a little of it, but it looks like a hell of a ride! If you want on, you can preorder it at a bunch of places: Jetse has links for all …
Outsider Writing
Now that I’m back in Korea, and have a free morning, I’m just catching up on some blogs and fiction online and so on. I ran across a very interesting post at Aliette de Bodard’s blog, titled, Writing cultures: insider vs. outsider, about the various advantages and pitfalls faced by authors writing about a specific culture either as an insider, or as an outsider, for a Western audience (as in the dominant SF-reading audience, for example). It’s worth a read, including the comments, especially if you’re interested in my thoughts on the subject.
Alone With Gandhari
As of right now, my story “Alone With Gandhari” is online as part of Clarkesworld issue #42. (Yeah!) If you’re more of a fiction listener, I can happily direct you to the wonderful Clarkesworld podcast of the story in which the tale is narrated (and briefly but insightfully commented upon) by the ever-sensitive and dramatic reader Kate Baker. The rest of the lineup is well worth checking out, too: Jeremy L.C. Jones interviews Kij Johnson (about, among other things, her Nebula-nominated “Spar,” which appeared alongside my last story in Clarkesworld) and there’s a short piece on neuroscience and SF by …
Purdy Covers and More Publication News…
Well, it’s time for an update. I may have mentioned some of this before, but to make sure I’ve mentioned it all: Carmelo Rafala has added my story, “The Broken Pathway” to The Immersion Book of SF, Vol. 1, which is due out sometime this spring from Immersion Press. It’s a story near to my heart, because it’s set in the neighborhood where I live, but a little over a century ago, during the Sino-Japanese war (the bit that trespassed into what is now “Korean” territory). It features Korean monks, a Japanese geomancer, some government officials, and the mountain I …
Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content
The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take up residence in the caves of Afghanistan or up in North Korea just to get the freedom to research things that have been banned by everyone else. It reminded me of a funny thing an ex-student in Beijing told me — this blog is blocked …
“Of Melei, of Ulthar” — Online at Clarkesworld!
New story! New story! My newest story — “Of Melei, of Ulthar” — is online in the October 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, along with a very intense story titled “Spar,” by Kij Johnson. (This is also the story being podcast this month at Clarkesworld, too!) (Interestingly, we have shared a table of contents before, in Asimov’s SF, last summer. It’s a pleasure to share a TOC once more with as distinguished an author as Johnson. Here’s her website, by the way.) EDIT: Ugh, and as someone whose own work has appeared in the nonfiction section of Clarkesworld before (here), I’m …
How to Rob a Bank
Jwz has it. Jwz has moved it. And they say you can’t learn anything watching Hollywood movies. This is a crime that just couldn’t have happened without the “heist” genre of films. But reading this, it struck me: there will be a last bank robbery in the world. People will still be hacking banks for as long as that’s possible, but someday paper money will stop circulating, or continue to circulate but become worth less than the trouble it takes to rob it. When it does, there will be no more bank robberies, except as political statements or artistic performances. …
Giving It Away For Free?
Those of you who know my taste in music know I’m not all that crazy about hip-hop, but I have to say, there are a few tracks on the new Super Chron Flight Brothers album (titled Indonesia) which are pretty cool. I particularly like “African Robotics” and “Broccoli.” Don’t ask me why: it’s very, um, Mouse on Mars meets Wu-Tang Clan, or something. With moments of Pete Namlook-ishness, and smatterings of that flutey Futurefantastafricanistic sound (yeah, my own term, baby) that always makes me think of Sonny Fortune’s hypnotic flute solo on that amazing Miles Davis album, Pangaea. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/fRXwqX1ag2Q” …