Archive for Speculative Fiction
I think I’ve now read nearly all of Joanna Russ’s published fiction. A couple of people who haven’t read her work have recently asked me for recommendations for starting points, so here’s an attempt to provide some. As with my Delany-starting-points post from last year, I’m dividing this into categories, depending on what you’re interested […]
I’m excited that five Joanna Russ novels are going to be released as ebooks (from Open Road Media) in three days, on May 8. The books are: And Chaos Died The Female Man Picnic on Paradise The Two of Them We Who Are About To… Also, Russ’s excellent nonfiction book How to Suppress Women’s Writing […]
I’m sad to learn that Mary Rosenblum has died. I think she was recently best-known as a mystery writer, under the name Mary Freeman, but I was most familiar with her Drylands series, about a future Pacific Northwest with very little water. I particularly liked the first story in that series, “Water Bringer.” The whole […]
Didn’t sleep much or well on Friday night, I think mostly because I stayed up way too late reading and playing iOS games. Hung out with Karen and Pär and Jeremiah during the day on Saturday, mostly playing Terraforming Mars, which has become one of my favorite boardgames. Then came home to help Kam move […]
I was a big fan of Andre Norton’s work when I was a kid. (Yes, I do feel a little guilty that I’m writing this post when I still haven’t finished the Le Guin post that I meant to write last week. I hope to do that soon. But this post is easier to write.) […]
The excellent old tabletop roleplaying game Fringeworthy had a page of tables for quickly generating the physical appearance of an...
I’m in Santa Fe for a few days. Mary Anne is here for a Wild Cards authors gathering, and I’m...
Jon Bois's tour-de-force multimedia science fiction future-of-football extravaganza “17776” is now complete. 25 brief chapters. Well worth reading/viewing, even for...
Nichelle Nichols on naming Uhura and on getting the part (transcribed by me from a making-of segment on the ST:TOS...
A few years ago, I nominated Jon Bois's unusual future-of-football story “Tebow in the CFL: A memoir” for a Hugo....
Another lesson for me on the difficulty of seeing outside your own cultural context: In Delany's City of a Thousand...
I've just started reading both Norman Spinrad's 1980 Songs from the Stars (first chapters set in a post-apocalypse quasi-ecotopia in...