Archive for Speculative Fiction
I now have author-gender stats for over 80 anthologies that I’ve looked at in the past couple years, from my father’s and my bookshelves, with publication dates ranging from 1951 through about 1990, plus a few outliers outside of that date range. (This post is essentially an update of my post from a couple years […]
Here’s the next Strange Horizons Flashback story: “How to Hide Your Heart,” by Deborah Coates A man who hunts monsters meets a woman who’s really good at driving. (Somewhat NSFW.) (Content warning for hints of bad things in character backstory.) (Published in 2008.) (5,300 words.) He’s a hunter. And the things he hunts live in […]
I’ve been reading William Tenn stories, from NESFA Press’s 2001 volume Immodest Proposals: The Compete Science Fiction of William Tenn, Volume 1. I used to like Tenn’s work a lot, but these days I’m not a good audience for satire, even when I agree with it politically. I’m skimming the stories and mostly rolling my […]
Here are some recurring themes and tropes that seem to me to be a lot more prominent than usual in this year’s Hugo-nominated fiction. (For some of these items, by “a lot more prominent” I just mean featured in two of the nominated works; but in those cases, I feel like even two is more […]
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...