Introduction to SFF – 7 – Grandmasters
Who are your Grandmasters of Science Fiction?
Introduction to SFF – 6 – Discovery
One of the joys of reading magazines, as opposed to books, is the thrill of discovery.
Low Intensity – 4 – M. K. Wren
I strongly urge you to check out the Phoenix Legacy trilogy. It’s a terrific series (also available as ebooks). Even if you don’t like romance, but like real, human characters in a speculative setting – you’ll like The Phoenix Legacy.
Introduction to SFF – 5 – Return to the Pulps
Of course, one of the great things about magazines, as with anthologies, is exactly the unexpected, the little surprises, the unknowns whose work thrills you
Introduction to SFF – 4- Slick
After I was introduced to pulp magazines in the 70s and read Isaac Asimov’s stories of his encounters with John Campbell back in the Golden Age, I started seriously looking for science fiction. For one thing, I picked up the rest of the Early Asimov. My parents noticed, and they got my brother (equally interested) […]
low intensity – 3 – M. J. Engh
M.J. Engh can hardly be said to have sailed under the radar. She received the SFWA‘s Author Emeritus award in 2009, and her 1976 novel Arslan was republished in Gollancz‘ SF Masterwork series in 2010. She also published the respected novel Wheel of the Winds in 1988, a less well known book, Rainbow Man, in […]
Introduction to SFF – 3 – Dark they Were, and Golden Eyed
I’d been introduced to the idea of owning my own books pretty young, but as a child in Vienna, I didn’t have much money to buy them – English books were expensive, and I was pretty cheap. But when we moved to London in the late 70s, all that changed. I didn’t get any more […]
Low Intensity – 2 – Katie Waitman
Katie Waitman was the Del Rey Discovery of the Year for 1997 with her novel The Merro Tree. Del Rey stopped the series soon after, but if Waitman was the measure of it, I’m not sure why they did. Every now and then, you read a book that just blows you away. That was my […]
Introduction to SFF – 2 – Pulp
I learned a lot about pulp magazines from the early Asimov. To be precise, from The Early Asimov. I’d encountered a few samples of pulp a little earlier, through the mysterious Ms X, as detailed in a previous post, and they were magical. But it was Asimov who put it all in context. I got […]
Low Intensity – 1 – Jim Aikin
This will be an occasional series about good writers who either haven’t produced very much book-length speculative fiction, or are, in my opinion, under-appreciated. Jim Aikin is something of a mix of the two categories. These days, he blogs mostly about music and MIDI, and he’s writing books like Fruityloops: The Ultimate Electronic Virtual Music […]
Introduction to SFF – 1 – The Mysterious Ms X
In the 1970s, we lived in Vienna for five wonderful years. I loved it, but all my experiences fall into one mental time frame, and I have trouble remembering what came first. So, I know that I was reading whatever was on my parents’ shelves, including a lot of Gogol, Dickens, and, for reasons known […]