Here’s another best-story-of-2008 poll I’ve got a story in, the Reader’s Poll at Fantasy Magazine. Those who’ve been following along should vote. (I’m not saying you should vote for my story… whatever hit you hardest would be the best choice! I’m not caught up, so we’ll have to see whether I manage it. I’m working through my neglected stack of issues of Asimov’s first.)
Category: SF
Twilight, But Better, or, Even a Crappy Vampire Film Can Be Improved by Ripping off White Wolf Games’s World of Darkness
Okay, so, I’d already been expecting crap. (I mean CRAP.) My SF-reading friends warned me. Reviews and discussions online warned me. I mean, even non-SF people had told me that Twilight was a bad movie, but when it hit theaters in Korea this December, I decided I would go and see it. It took me until a day or two ago to follow through with that. And of course, it was crap. (I mean CRAP.)
Twitterfiction
My friend Maura mentioned selling some stories to this newish SF/F/H venue for fiction, called Thaumatrope, which publishes content Twitter-style. I don’t use Twitter myself — mainly because I can’t access it throughout the day, mobile-wise, at least not for now, and it feels like that would be the real point of Twitter. (That may change if and when I get a smartphone, but for now, I’m overloaded enough when I sit down to my computer.) “Stories” is one way of putting it what Thaumatrope publishes, anyway. Twitter posts can be, at most, 140 characters. If you think flash fiction …
Asimov’s Readers’ Awards, 2008
The Asimov’s SF 2008 Reader’s Awards ballot is up. If you’ve read the magazine for the year, you can vote for which Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Poem, and Cover you liked best. I’m not saying you should necessarily vote for either of my pieces that appear on the list — there’s lots of good stuff to choose from — but if you did read all year, or read something in 2008 that really grabbed you and didn’t let go, then you should vote. You can even email it in until February 2nd!
Válka s Mloky
“Nowadays we simply cannot wait a few hundred years for something good or bad to happen in the world. Take the migration of peoples which used to drag on over several centuries: today, with our present organization of transport, it could be accomplished in three years; otherwise there would be in profit in it. The same is true of the liquidation of the Roman Empire, the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians, and so on. All these things could have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the hands of entrepreneurs with …