I’ve been ill, and haven’t managed to mention, something here that I’m sure some of my readers might be interested in. Tony Smith, my friend and the driving force behind Starship Sofa, has launched a workshop series for aspiring SF authors. The first one will be held on 12 March, online, and live. There’s a pretty respectable lineup and series of topics planned: The Beginning – Gregory Frost Plot Tricks from the Dark Side – James Patrick Kelly How To Fix Your Story After It’s Written and You Discover That It Doesn’t Work – Michael Swanwick Why Writing Groups – Mercurio …
Category: SF
Mind Meld, and Mission Accomplished (in Draft)
Two things I’ve written. One you can read, one you can’t. Here’s the one you can: SF Signal’s Mind Meld for the week is about to-read piles, and I’m one of the people they invited to contribute/comment. See everyone’s to-read lists here. I should note that a number of the people who contributed are, in fact, in my extended to-read list. I’m just not getting more books for now till I’ve sorted what to do with the thousand or so I already have. The thing you can’t read, yet, is a ~5000 word story (it’s a few words short, but …
초능력자
Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”1) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described: …pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t …
Campus Damocles, and Regenesis
The internet has been off on campus for two days–not in professors’ offices, and mostly not in department offices, but in a lot of classrooms, and of course the wifi is off. One person told me her Wibro (roaming wifi-like service) even seemed to be blocked–or nonfunctional, in any case–on campus. The official explanation is that pigeons disabled the power and internet on campus two days ago, but the idea that they haven’t managed to fix it since then, is growing more and more, well… you read my blog, and you know that except for an outage on Wednesday, there’s …
Days Flying By…
Today was a busy day during which I didn’t get much done, which is odd since I have a lot to do this week. On Saturday, Miss Jiwaku and I joined Chris, a member of the crit group to which I now belong, at the 2010iSF film festival, where we saw 2001: A Space Odyssey and Aelita: The Revolt of the Robots in the morning. We were starving, so we left after that, but missed a screening of Metropolis with a live pianist playing the accompanying music, and The Forbidden Planet in the evening. On Sunday, we had crit group, …
Coming Soon: Gwacheon International SF Film Festival!
So I should have posted about this before, but there’s an SF Film Festival on soon. It’s starting in a few days (28 October) and runs until 7 November, down at the National Science Museum in Gwacheon, South Korea. There’s a twitter account that’s announcing events and so on, but unless you read Korean, it won’t mean much to you. Much better to head over to the website. It’s a chance to see all kinds of SF films on the big screen, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and the sequel) to an all-night Back to the Future trilogy marathon this …
Well, I’m Glad It’s Ridley Scott Doing It
… that is, if someone has to turn my favorite PKD book into a TV miniseries. Between that and Guillermo del Toro doing At the Mountains of Madness, I can say one thing: it’s good that people who actually like SF are making these movies.
Elizabeth Moon on Islam “Citizenship”
I don’t know Elizabeth Moon personally, I don’t know her work, and I don’t have a clue whether her recent post (from a couple of weeks ago) ought to come as much of a surprise. I do know that there is some really questionable, problematic stuff in her post titled “Citizenship” — and as much as people were calling it a post on Islam, Islam isn’t the main topic. Which isn’t to deny that most of what’s off-putting and tiresome and all too familiar about it is what she says about Islam; my point is that there’s more in there …
Addendum #2 to [Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours)
Note: This is an addendum to this original post, and to the first addendum I posted the other day. Some of the discussion that has cropped up in the responses to the earlier post and addendum to which this is appended (and which I want to address) is concerned with the “colonialism” or “imperialism” of the status I suggested American mainstream non-SF media have for average Korean viewers. That is to say, questions were raised as to whether this non-SF having a kind of pseudo-SFnal, utopian quality — in that it depicts a world not only radically different, but also …
Addendum to [Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours)
Over at the Livejournal mirror of this site, I was asked, just now, to clarify something about my last post, titled “[Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours),” why in the point I called Access I placed so much emphasis on foreign works in translation. I thought I would clarify that, as well as adding a point or two from the recent paper I presented at WorldCon. Note: I suggest you click that link, and see the original post first, before reading what follows. First: I emphasize foreign works in translation as an important part of “Access” to SF …