Archive for Speculative Fiction
Some assorted good things: There’s now only one published Joanna Russ story that I don’t have a copy of (and a university library may be sending me that last one soon). And I’m making progress on a couple of Russ-related projects. I’ve been helping the Otherwise Award folks catch up on various tasks and get […]
I’m sad that Howard Waldrop has died, age 77. I’m trying to remember when I first encountered his work. Probably sometime in the ’80s? Even though he was never all that widely popular with readers, several prominent editors loved his work; for example, I might have seen a story or two of his in Omni, […]
Here are some thoughts about three old sf stories. (These thoughts include spoilers.) The stories aren’t particularly connected to each other except by appearing in the same anthology. Story 1: “Environment,” by Chester S. Geier (1944) The two male human protagonists, who are the only characters in the story, constantly say each other’s names when […]
I’m reading The Omnibus of Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Groff Conklin, first published in 1954 and reprinted in 1980. The 1980 edition has a 1-page foreword by R. Scott Latham. I like this line from that: “We came to science fiction, not to escape what we were, but to explore what we might […]
At some point in the late 1980s, someone (I think Geoff H) suggested that it might be fun to create a Once Upon a Time variant based on the conventions/tropes of space opera. (In place of the fairytale tropes of OUaT.) So we cut a bunch of index cards in half and invited friends to […]
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 […]