Another Prodigal Reprint

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I got another book in the post the other day! Supposedly the publication date for this one in in July, but it seems available at some places, at least: Somehow, my shaggy dog story has been reprinted in three languages so far—Chinese and Czech, along with English—and appeared in two Year’s Best collections so far! This one is The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois  and published by St. Martin’s Griffin (which is MacMillan). It’s the second time Gardner has selected one of my stories to appear in his annual anthology, and as always it’s an honour, …

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How to Play Hazard (The Dice Game)

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Here’s something I came across researching the book project I’m working on right now, set in early Georgian London: hazard, a dice game with crazy rules, though it’s the ancestor of the simplified dice game craps, which I’m pretty sure is familiar to anyone reading this. Kristen Koster has a reasonably good summary of the game here, but I figured I’d try write it up as well, and see if I couldn’t make the rules a little simpler to follow. I figured some notes about cheating would also be appropriate, since that was widespread in dice games historically. Whether you’re …

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“Focus” in Analog

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My short story “Focus” is in the current issue of Analog! I was happy to discover this when I received contributor copies on Friday in the mail. (I’ve been too busy to post an update since then, and likewise I’m so behind on everything that I only noticed the story was out when I received the print copies…) The story is set in Vietnam—in Saigon and a South Korean-run factory complex in nearby Bình Dương Province, and is about how companies parasitize everything—or, rather, convince us to allow them to parasitize everything to better serve their ends. It’s inspired in part …

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Tales of Malawi, 1950-1975

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Last year, my wife conspired with my sister Marie to acquire for me a reprint of a book my sister had printed up chronicling some of the stories my dad had told Marie and her husband Troy as they’d prepared for a trip to Malawi and South Africa many years ago. It took some work for my sister to pull off the reprint, since she’d self-published the book using some program on an old (and now defunct) Mac… but somehow she managed it, and I received a copy for Christmas, a labour for which I am deeply grateful. The book, …

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Mary Ambree and Female Warriors

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Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers of fantasy talk about historical female warriors—the historicity of women marching into battle alongside men—and there’s obviously value in looking at history, because there are plenty of dumbasses out there who will be quick to say something stupid like, “But women didn’t march into battle! That’s dumb!” There will be nitwits who will say it’s feminist claptrap, or unbelievable, or implausible, or whatever. (I mean, I suppose we should spend time correcting such ignorance and stupidity when we encounter it, at least occasionally, right? So: yes, it is plausible. There definitely were societies where women …

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Now In Print…

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The past week or so has been good on the writing front, or at least in the publishing front. I finally received my copy of Volume 2 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, edited by Neil Clarke: What a handsome cover! My contributor copy apparently was sitting in the department office, and nobody told me. I happened to stop by and discovered it by chance… and who knows how long it’d been there? (I check my mailbox there, but this was a package so it didn’t fit the cubby and was sitting on a shelf below, where I’ll admit I never look.) Want a …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII

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This entry is part 48 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. In this installment, I dig into Canto LXII, the first of the ten Adams Cantos, while touching on Merrymount and …

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Prodigal in SF World

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It’s been a tense time lately here in South Korea, but one bright spot recently was how delighted I found myself when I received contributor copies for the current issue of China’s SF World (the 03.2017 issue). A Chinese translation of my December 2016 Analog story “Prodigal” was published in this issue, and it was wonderful to get a look at it firsthand. It’s an attractive journal-sized magazine with a very colorful, striking cover: It reminded me a little of Science Fiction Age, the 90s SF magazine that I think was really the first such magazine I read regularly. I really found myself wishing I could read all the other material in the …

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Il paese della giovinezza (The Country of the Young)

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Late last week, I got news that “Il paese della giovinezza” (The Country of the Young) was about to be published. It’s an ebook collection of some of my SF stories in Italian translation, which is very exciting! The collection, which was edited by Francesco Verso and published by Future Fiction, includes the following stories: “The Country of the Young” (Interzone 219, November 2008) “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” (Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, 2010) “The Bodhisattvas” (Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010) “Alone with Gandhari” (Clarkesworld #42, March 2010.) The cover art shows the protagonist in the title story, and was created by Chiara Topo, of the Scuola Internazionale di …

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Kate J. Sim on Foreign Men and Sexual Violence in Korea (Or, What Happens When You Study Critical Theory But Not Statistics)

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Update (31 March 2017): Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling of course beat me to the punch on this, though I didn’t see his post until just now. His numbers are different from mine: he remembers to include numbers for U.S. servicemen (which I didn’t: they’re probably about 20,000 in the Seoul area, but that’s an estimate he gives, and makes a marginal difference), and he’s using a different source and criteria for tourist data (I went with all Europeans, Oceanians, and Canadians/Americans, since Koreans tend to assume anyone white is “American.”) Despite these differences, Sim’s argument still looks ridiculous. But Matt …

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