Tag: my writing

The Mudang’s Dance (Reprint)

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

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

gordsellar2 Comments

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’ …

Continue Reading

He’s No Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but…

gordsellar4 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

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

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

Bluebell the Fairy’s Birthday Present

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading