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.
Whenever I’m asked to write an introduction or a short bio, I’m always tempted to quote from the Rolling Stones’ song, “Sympathy For the Devil.” You know the line: “Please allow me to introduce myself, […]
WSFA Small Press Award Committee is accepting nominations for its 2013 Award for stories published in 2012. The submission period will close on April 5. The Washington Science Fiction Association [www.wsfa.org] has established a literary […]
One of the things that has always been perfect for short films is that you can take a known property and play with it for a while. The perfect example of that is the classic […]
It is the time of year when the studios start looking at new pilots to hit screens this year. Some we will never see, some will never last more than a few episodes and others […]
Over at the Synthetic Voices podcast, I see a LOT of fiction over the course of a calendar year. Now, the 2012th year of the Common Era is coming to a close, so I thought I’d […]
Folks who read my author bio will have realized I lead an interesting life or that I have a passion for Starbucks. No wait, that wasn’t it. Yes, you will have noticed that I’m something of a […]
As Harry Turtledove, the master of alternate history, said in the introduction to The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, even historical memoirs can sometimes be so far from the truth they can be […]
If you love to start your day with photos of catacombs and bone chandeliers, or listen to ectoplasmic psychodramas while doing your grocery shopping, then quality genre-related newsfeeds that bring you the best art, fiction, […]
UPDATE: Tomorrow, one of our blog team -Lesley Smith, has a very interesting piece. Lesley is a blind geek who has been reviewing television for us. Tomorrow she’ll clue us all in on how she […]
Space Eldritch Nathan Shumate, ed. Cold Fusion Media Tpb $13.99, ebook $5.99 Kindle Nook Smashwords Two of the most popular subgenres of the fantastic are space travel (with its myriad sub-subgenres) and cosmic entities with […]
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