Archive for Speculative Fiction
In early 2022, Jason Sanford published the results of his survey about genre magazines. I found the last two sections of the summary especially interesting: freeform responses to the questions “What could genre magazines and podcasts do to make you financially support them?” and “Any closing thoughts you'd like to share about SF/F magazines?” Some […]
Disclaimer: I’m not involved with this year’s Hugo Awards or Packet, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes; I’m just a Worldcon member who wants to read the works in the Packet. Part of the Hugo Packet is now available, for members of this year’s Worldcon. (If you’re not a […]
During the final episode of season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Kam made a joke that I really enjoyed. So I’ll tell you about it below, but it requires a little context for setup, and the context involves spoilers for the final two episodes of the season, “Subspace Rhapsody” and “Hegemony.” So I’ll […]
Neil Clarke addresses the idea that “Only writers subscribe to genre magazines.” I want to add some thoughts of my own: The community has been having this argument since at least the early 2000s, maybe longer. We occasionally worried about it when I was a Strange Horizons editor—we wondered whether most of our readers were […]
Number of stories from a given year that I normally manage to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: 0. Number of stories from 2022 that I set out (in February, 2023) to read before the Hugo nominating-ballot deadline: about 12. Number of stories from 2022 that I ended up reading over the past two and […]
I feel like a lot of recent portal fantasy has been about the kids’ trauma, either in the fantasy world or, after they come back, in the real world. But I only have a few data points, and I may be overgeneralizing, so I’m curious to hear what y’all think. Does this seem to you […]
I apparently haven’t posted here about the TV show Counterpart. I watched the first episode just under a year ago. (I no longer remember how I heard about it.) I liked the first ep quite a bit, so I rewatched it with Kam, and she liked it too, and we ended up watching both 10-episode […]
Some thoughts about a particular alternate-history TV show (that I mostly like, despite my dubiousness here): Imagine an alternate history in which a major event changed the world over 300 years ago, especially changing North America’s subsequent history in a big way. The change was so big that (for example) although the Revolutionary War still […]
I was sad to learn on Saturday that author Sally Gwylan died in October, “after being struck by a car” (quoting Worldcon’s In Memoriam page). We published Sally’s superb novelette “Rapture” in Strange Horizons in 2004, in two parts. (Part 1, Part 2.) In my SH Flashback writeup in 2016, I described it thusly: “A […]
Here’s a roundup of some responses to, and works that could be seen as being in dialogue with, Tom Godwin’s 1954 story “The Cold Equations.” (The original story is also available online.) The first five links below are nonfiction; the rest are fiction. I should note that I don’t really want to host yet another […]
“one does not simply walk away from Omelas” (—Frumiosa, in a comment at The Toast) There’ve been many many nonfiction articles about Omelas, but the pieces that I’m linking to here are all presented as fiction. “A House by the Sea,” by P. H. Lee What happens to the Omelas child when they get older? […]
My pick-a-random-unread-book system recently picked Joanna Russ’s reviews-and-essays collection The Country You Have Never Seen. I’m not normally a big reader of reviews—I don’t hate them, they’re just not something I tend to be super into. But in this case, I laughed out loud half a dozen times in the first couple dozen pages. Partly […]