Archive for Speculative Fiction

TV: _Counterpart_

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 […]

Althist translation

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 […]

R.I.P., Sally Gwylan

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 […]

Russ reviews

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 […]

Hilary Bailey and New Worlds

Today I learned about British sf writer and editor Hilary Bailey. I just read her 1964 novelette “The Fall of Frenchy Steiner.” I read it in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, in which I had previously read a couple of stories that I would classify as non-fantastical literary fiction, by a couple […]

And It Comes Out Here

(Spoilers here for various decades-old time-travel stories.) One of my favorite sf stories when I was a kid was Lester del Rey’s 1951 “…And It Comes Out Here,” in which a time traveler goes forward in time and steals a device (from a museum, I think) in the future, then comes back to the present […]

Le Guin chronological bibliography, revisited

A while back, I posted a chronological list of Le Guin’s major books, mostly put together by my friend Chaos. But lately, I’ve been wanting an expansion of that list that includes the original publication dates of short stories and essays. So here’s a fuller chronological list, ordered by publication year (and alphabetically within a year), […]