A couple of days ago, Toni Weisskopf posted a link to this letter from Edgar Rice Burroughs to a young Forrest J. Ackerman. It’s a pithy letter, shorter than most blog posts, but is a prescient rebuttal to this hot Read more…
Those people on the other side of the debate, the ones you attack with such righteous fury, who called down your wrath by acting in such an asinine and nasty fashion. . . they’re you. They’re called to this genre Read more…
Fuck this shit! Up to now I’ve been pretty quiet about this, but you all have finally pissed me off. I’m seeing all sorts of grandstanding, self-congratulatory, “I’m so fucking proud of fandom,” nonsense all over the place. This is Read more…
This month sees the omnibus re-issue of Forests of the Night and Fearful Symmetries in a single snazzy new package: The Moreau Quartet Volume One. For those of you that are worried about breaking up of the original Moreau trilogy, Read more…
Last weekend I had a fun time at the Confluence convention in Pittsburgh. One of the panels I attended was titled “7 Things That Every SF/F Story Contains.” Kudos to the panel moderator Joshua Palmatier who managed to be the Read more…
This weekend, Friday July 24 to Sunday July 26, I— along with my new shirts— will be attending Confluence, “Pittsburgh’s premier SF/F/H literary conference.” The location is: Doubletree by Hilton Cranberry Pittsburgh (that’s a mouthful) 910 Sheraton Drive, Mars, PA Read more…
While this blog post I read conflates a number of issues that I think are unrelated, it raises an issue that I think is valid for most authors to think about. It is the nature of most fiction, especially genre Read more…
There is a very old trope in SF, epitomized in the novel Slan by A. E. van Vogt, where a subset of humanity “evolves” some form of mental/psychic gift and is subsequently persecuted by the majority “normal” population. It’s a Read more…
I have read some stupid assertions about Science Fiction and Fantasy over the years. As I have internet access, this is inevitable. People say idiotic things occasionally. Then I read this from the Daily Kos, and watched as the bullshit Read more…
For various reasons I’ve been pondering thrillers as a genre lately, considering the directions of future projects. One of the nice things about SFF is the fact that it is the universal donor of literary genres. Tropes from science fiction Read more…