Tag: my writing

“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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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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Prodigal Reviews

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So, some positive reviews so far for “Prodigal,” which is nice to see. (Not everyone has the ability to totally ignore or dismiss critics and reviews so wholeheartedly encouraged by Miles Davis.) The highlights so far? Well, Greg Hullender’s review Rocket Stack Rank has this to say: “Moving, thought-provoking exploration of animal uplift. (…) as a metaphor for losing a loved one to a cause, it’s dynamite.” There’s an uncredited review at SFRevu that praises the story, too: “Sad story. Very well done.” And finally, Chuck Rothman over at Tangent has high praise: “[The issue] starts out with a bang with “Prodigal” by Gord Sellar… This …

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In Other News…

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It’s been such a busy time I haven’t updated much, but a lot has been going on, and not all of it relates to poo, diapers, 3:00am feedings, and baby wipes… There’s been some movement on several fronts, in fact: fiction writing & publication, RPG/game writing, and a workshop I attended just before Noeul was born. Publication News: Back in late September I got my copy of Cthulhu Fhtagn!, which contains my story “The Return of Sarnath” alongside new, original works by a number of Lovecraftian notables, as well as some authors new to me. Here’s the copy I got in …

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The Mudang’s Dance (Reprint)

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So, a few years ago, I was invited to write a piece for Arc Magazine. The result was “The Mudang’s Dance,” a piece on how accelerated modernization and social change seems to have given Korean society an interestingly different relationship with the future (and the past) from what dominates in the English-speaking world. The piece was only available in Arc 1.2… until now. It’s been reprinted in the premiere issue of Compass Cultura, a new travel webzine. See it here. (Note, it’s been a few years… which means my view has evolved somewhat since then; my view of Korea is always shifting and changing as new …

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Two Comets: H.G. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve been writing a couple of short stories, just to give myself a breather on the novel I’m working on. One of those stories, the one I discussed in connection with the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, is kind of response to two interesting “comet” SF stories I read back in 2010, and have been thinking about ever since: In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells, “The Comet” by W.E.B. Du Bois (which was collected in the first of Sheree Renée Thomas’ Dark Matter anthologies, but it’s also available in the public domain, as part Du Bois’ …

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He’s No Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but…

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I know, I’m late to the party, but lately I’ve been reading Sydney Padua’s the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (coming soon as a book, apparently?), and, well: Everyone loves Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and for good reason: though he was more like the Tony Stark of his age–“accomplished” barely touches how important an engineer he was during his short but influential career in early Victorian London–the Wolverine-like look he gets in Padua’s comic (and, well, in the photos, really) is, er… I’ll put it this way: as Padua has noted, he’s an extremely popular character. He even got …

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The Harlot’s Progress (BBC4) and The Georgian Underworld: A Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England by Rictor Norton

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Historical fiction–speculative or otherwise–is a challenge for a number of reasons, but probably the biggest challenge is the problem of texture: how to get the texture of that alien historical world right? This is what impressed me about China Miéville’s depiction of Bas-Lag in Perdido Street Station (a book I discussed here a decade ago): sure, as one friend commented, it reads like someone’s AD&D adventure… but the world is so utterly textured, so rife with details. It feels like a real city at some grungy, nasty moment in its history, like the festering horror-show that was London in an …

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Bluebell the Fairy’s Birthday Present

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A little break from serious posts… Late last year, I posted one chapter from the Reading Street textbook series that I cowrote with my former colleague Haeyoung Kim a few years ago. (That chapter was my second-favorite, a sort of anti-imperialist response to the kiddie portal fantasy subgenre, and a story I’m proud of, though it’s not quite the best of the bunch.) I also discussed the conscious ideological approach to writing this kids’ story, which from the beginning was simply intended for use in an English textbook. However, today I just noticed that my absolute favorite mini-story from the series, “Bluebell the …

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