A panel report from the panel at NoreastCon 4, featuring Lois McMaster Bujold, Ellen Kushner, Madeline Robins, Jo Walton.
Why should you care?
[Ellen Kushner] linked together violence and manners and sex and got SWORDSPOINT.
[oracne]
I wish I found this…
Good writing teases us with the possibility/impossibility of sharing the
intimacy and power of someone else’s invisible vision. . .[In mediocre
writing] we find ourselves at the conclusion. . . exactly where we knew we were
going all along. A familiar place. No surprises. No necessity to change
ourselves. Difference resolved, dissolved. What had been hidden behind the veil
becomes commonplace, unthreatening. . .Most of what passes for art, particularly narrative art, advertises
mainstream values and culture. . . This art tells us that other peoples’ lives
aren’t actually invisible, not intrinsically unknowable. We learn that anybody’s
story can be reduced to familiar terms, /our/ terms, the terms our way of
living prioritizes. Stories that do mount a challenge to our everyday
conventions and assumptions stir my blood. Not only because they are exciting
formally and philosophically, but because they retain for fiction its special
subversive, radically democratic role.
John Edgar Wideman
I like to know where things come from. Steven E. Wedel has a nice essay on how American Gothic and tales of the Supernatural gave rise to modern horror over at IROSF. (Free subscription required.)
The Internet Review of Science Fiction will still offer free subscriptions until the end of November.
Please take the time to check them out and support them if you like their work. Support can come in many forms. While I’m certain cash would be appreciated, feedback–what you liked and what you don’t like–might be just as valuable in the long run.
Powell’s offers a number of intriguing author interviews online.
The Harvard-Yenghing Library hosts the photographs of Hedda Morrison, a freelance photographer living and working in China from 1933-1946. A priceless view of land not easily remembered.
You will need to use the VIA search engine (provided) to view images.
Now if only I could find the same thing for Indonesia…
If you’re like me, not only do you still have a few covers in your collection that look like this, you probably still have the Popular Science magazines in which they appeared.
If all stories were written like science fiction stories is annoying, trivial and disingenuous as it makes fun of the very worst of SF from a bygone era.
On the other hand, this parody is uncomfortably close to how most SF is still written today. [judithberman]
Cathy Buburuz posts the following call for submissions from FT readers:
If anyone out there has an entertaining horror story that takes place in a boneyard or is somehow related to a cemetery, please know that I’m editing a new print anthology titled Potter’s Field for Sam’s Dot Publishing that will see print in January 2005. Visit the GUIDELINES page here for details and pay rates…submit soon. If all else fails, paste this into a search engine: http://www.samsdotpublishing.com-Cathy Buburuz
I had a little trouble getting to the website so be persistent and patient. The first time, I was redirected to a random search engine. The second time I got through.
You always thought books appeared on the shelves of your local B&N because underpaid stockers put them there.