There are some excellent points in ten things I have learned from writing popular fiction. A few favorites are: 2. It helps if you honestly like to blow stuff up. Or at least write about blowing stuff up. 3. All books are broken. Some are less broken than others. Some are broken in ways that a particular set of readers do not mind in the least. If you can find out the group of people who do not mind the ways in which your books are broken, you have identified your target audience. Unfortunately, this fact does not excuse you …
Category: BOOKS & AUTHORS
Solaris author Stanislaw Lem dies
Octavia Butler passed away last month, and now SF author Stanislaw Lem has passed away. SF has lost two bright stars in a short time.
The New York Review of Books: Who Killed Christopher Marlowe?
A fascinating question, isn’t it?
Octavia Butler, age 58, passed away last month.
While I haven’t read anything of her writing yet , I’ve planned to do so for several years. But this sad news matters to anyone who cares about SF literature: Octavia E. Butler has died.
The Ralph Ellison Experience
I don’t kno much about the man himself, but his book Invisible Man is is a hell of an experience. Can any of my readers attest to this? It’s a qualitatively different book than anything I’ve read in the last few years, in a few different ways. For one thing, it just grabbed me from the first page, and has drawn me on ever since. I found the book on the sale table in a shopping mall when I was walking with my mom and my nephew, and since it was only fifty cents, and a book I’d intended to …
Cory Doctorow Story — Printcrime
It took me a total of about 3 minutes to read the whole thing, and I quite enjoyed it. I think you will too.
Primer (2004)
Have you seen Primer? I watched it just before I moved, and I have to say, my initially bad feeling washed away as I suddenly got the movie, understood what it was about, and followed it happily to its conclusion. The thing is, it’s SF. It’s also deadly quiet, deadly calm, slow, and very geeky. Spooky and geeky. It’s spooky because it seems to me it’s realistic in a way that isn’t common in SF. It brings to mind the comments from Ritu’s LJ which I bookmarked on my other computer, where she linked to this essay by Pam Noles …
Cory’s Podcasts
Are any of my readers doing like me, and enjoying the absolutely wonderful podcasts that Cory Doctorow has made of his short (and longish) stories — some of them in progress, others previously published? I’m really enjoying them, so much so that I’m even considering doing something like this myself with stories in progress, or stories at the beta stage — you know, things finished but needing a rewrite or some fine editing. Reading aloud helps with this, and why not let others enjoy the reading aloud bit. Would any readers be interested in me podcasting older stories of mine? …
The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 by Gordon Sellar
Well, now, I suppose I really ought to read this: The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 by, yes, Gordon Sellar.
The Miéville List
I’m posting the Miéville List — the fifty-book list that I am planning to slowly work my way through over the next couple of years — mostly to note that some of these books are going to be pretty damned hard to get my hands on in Korea, seeing that they’re either out of print and the kind of thing you mostly only find in used book stores. Yes, this is a kind of appeal to the kindness of strangers, but not a loud one. After all, with the degree of traveling I’ve been doing, in some ways I have …