The nineteenth century closes with two books that will be imitated constantly for the next hundred years or so: Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. To a […]
FROM THE IN BOX Author Launches Ambitious SF Series S.F. author Stokely Gittens has launched a S.F. series based around the character, Peter Paul, a human-cheetah hybrid. The gripping SF-action novel opens with the lead […]
Happy Monday, everybody! I’m very excited to be joining the Amazing Stories Magazine blogging staff. Every week, I’ll be posting something new, mostly focusing on anime! Anime is an interesting and widespread topic, and I […]
Why am I self-published? Well, firstly, because I’m spoiled. I was just talking to my significant other, who happens to live a half a continent away from me. I had sent him a piece to […]
There are two words in the English language that never fail to give me a painful case of writers block: Query Letter. Just the thought of it has me wiping sweaty palms on my jeans. […]
I was asked by Sol Cohen in April 1968 to succeed Harry Harrison as Editor of Amazing Stories. One hundred dollars a month, a limitless supply of letterhead stationary and full reimbursement of postage. “We’ll […]
Frogs in Aspic Keith P. Graham Kindle only $1.99 I’m partial to short fiction, especially lately when I have so many interruptions it seems to take forever to finish a novel. So when a collection […]
Two front teeth? What strange, horrible and twisted things happened to that kid that all she wanted was body parts? Me? All I wanted was every darned space, army and action toy they could cram […]
Hello again, and welcome back! So – what, exactly, do I mean by ‘unknown or underappreciated’? To put it simply – not everyone is a Kevin J. Anderson or David Weber or Eric Flint or […]
One of my usual rants is that science fiction writers are lazy. (And greedy, but that’s another story.) Of course, both accusations are not true when you look at the careers of specific writers and […]
John W. Campbell, aka – Don A Stuart, wrote for Astounding Science-Fiction. His work Who Goes There? was voted the best science fiction novella EVER. Okay, slip of the tongue. ONE of the best. Sorry. […]
May you live in interesting times. So goes the curse…. Last year at IlluxCon, a convention devoted purely to the buying, selling and showing of painted art – I overheard a young artist saying to […]
If you’ve ever considered becoming a writer, surely you’ve heard the old expression, “Don’t quit your day job.” But what can you really expect as far as income is concerned? Let’s first explore traditional publishing. […]
Author J. M. Barrie is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, but I’m extremely fond of his comic play The Admirable Crichton – especially when he has Ernest Woolley whine, “I’m not young enough to […]
Over the last three weeks I have discussed the sources and causes of Science Fictions self-esteem problem. The genre’s inability to shed it’s pulp roots and ongoing pulpishness, the relative obscurity of SF to the […]
The Bloodlight Chronicles by Steve Stanton revives originality in today’s science fiction with a complex cyberpunk series.
Intelligent robots have been part of the SciFi lexicon since before Fritz Lang’s seminal file Metropolis. While it’s fun to imagine what the world would be like with intelligent machines, the sad truth is that […]
Why You Never “Sell” a Story: Understanding rights and licensing (conclusion) Welcome back. This is the fifth in my weekly series of posts on how to market and sell short fiction. You can check out […]
Previously I blogged about that favourite trope of SF & Fantasy illustration: The Scantily Clad Female. That topic generated a lot of comments, so let’s look at the opposite end of the spectrum and see […]
NASA’s Kepler mission has been watching a swath of the Milky Way watching for the signs of stars being eclipsed by planets in orbit around them. This takes patience and favorable geometry, but Kepler has […]
Welome back to another Fannish Friday!
Our Top Ten Posts for the week of Jan 25-31 were:
I have been producing fanzines off and on since 1976, shortly after encountering science fiction fandom and this particular aspect of that hobby interest. As anybody who has ever pubbed (that is fanspeak for “published”) […]
This year was the 40th ConFusion. Or perhaps it will be next year. The numerology of this Michigan convention has always been somewhat doubtful, since its numbering started with 13, unless you count the initial […]
2013 sees the twentieth anniversary of Jurassic Park. To celebrate, a 3D version will be released in the USA in April: https://www.jurassicpark.com/index_splash.html. Dinosaurs are hotter than ever before and that’s good news. Their snapping jaws […]
The old axiom about not judging a book by its cover notwithstanding, I am going to judge the merits of various book covers that wrapped editions of heroic fiction. This is not a scholarly article, […]
Now that’s an interesting question. We’ve just launched my first novel, Shh! It’s a Secret: a novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender’s Guide, at Arisia. It got written up in both Publisher’s Weekly and the […]
Lisa Tuttle has long been one of the masters of the deeply unsettling tale. Last year her short story Objects in Dreams may be Closer than they Appear opened Jonathan Oliver’s excellent anthology, House of Fear, […]
Last week, we talked about some of the tensions between science fiction and noir. Fantasy, which relies on metaphor even more than science fiction, has an even more challenging time of it. Its traditional themes […]
The holidays are over, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to forego the classics. You know the shows I’m talking about- all the old movies and cartoons from the past fifty years we get out […]
The real scandal is that it took anyone this long to write a poem in space. The solution is easy.
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