Here’s one final interview from ICON 38, with two guests of honor, Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead.
[Alvaro Zinos-Amaro] What’s been the high point of ICON 38 for you?
[Jack Skillingstead] I liked DreamCon, the workshop for high school and college students. It was fun sitting there talking to the students. I also liked getting to know Ellen Datlow better. I’vet met her a few times, but hadn’t spent a ...Read More
Read moreLast month I had the pleasure of attending ICON 38, Iowa’s long-running science fiction convention. After closing ceremonies, I sat down with SFWA Grand Master and ICON co-founder Joe Haldeman, and his wife Gay, and asked him some questions.
[Alvaro Zinos-Amaro] How has ICON changed over the last 38 years? Has it changed?
[Joe Haldeman] It has. Oddly enough, not the people. The people are the same. But it’s ...Read More
Read moreKaren Burnham
I wanted to let you all know that I’m going to be stepping down from managing the Locus Roundtable blog. I’ve got a second little person on the way, and too many commitments and not enough time. Luckily, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, whom many of you know, will be stepping in to take over. I look forward to seeing what he does with the site!
I want to thank Locus ...Read More
Read moreOne last spin-off from yesterday’s discussion on organizing books…
Jonathan Strahan
It probably says something deeply disturbing about me, but there is something incredibly satisfying, almost on at a DNA level, about putting books in their place. When I finally amalgamated a lot of shelves and for the first time all thirteen volumes of The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon sat together I felt a zen-like calm descend on me, ...Read More
Read moreFollowing on from yesterday’s discussion on organizing books…
John Clute
There was a Readercon panel this year — inspired by a very good panel at WFC in Toronto — about building a collection in a way both organizes its contents and makes those contents accessible as a presentation, as a kind of body English, of the meaning of those contents.
Any non-alphabetic organization of authors — ie sorting books by ...Read More
Read moreHow do you organize your bookshelves? To Be Read piles? Are they alphabetized? If you’re like me and can only dream of having organized bookshelves at the moment, how would you organize them if you had the time? How about magazines?
Stacie Hanes
They’re grouped by subject. I wish I had the time and space for full LOC organization. I don’t have the space to hang on to magazines.
Elizabeth ...Read More
Read moreFive SF stories about Linotype machines
We don’t see much science-fiction about Linotype machines any more, and it’s easy to forget how radically those big, noisy heffalumps changed the world. Their invention in 1886 spawned publishing’s industrial revolution, and the machines remained pretty much the same over the entire 20th century, even as they were being superseded, first by phototypesetting and then by digital type.
The Linotype and its operators ...Read More
Read moreOn February 12 of this year, Armando Corridore, owner and publisher of the firm Elara Libri in Bologna, Italy, e-mailed me an invitation to attend Italcon 39 – “the annual Italian congress of fantastic literature” – as its sole American literary guest.
Armando explained that the convention would be held in Bellaria, “a quiet seaside town on the Adriatic coast,” from May 23 – May 26. It ...Read More
Read moreThis month we talk to two notables from the Philippines. Charles A. Tan and Dean Francis Alfar give us a tour of the speculative fiction authors working in their country right now.
http://locusmag.com/Blog/SBP06_Philippines.mp3Dean Francis Alfar is a Filipino playwright, novelist and writer of speculative fiction. His plays have been performed in venues across the country, while his articles and fiction have been published both in his native Philippines and ...Read More
Read moreContinued from Wednesday…
Gardner Dozois
It’s kind of sad how many of the SF writers, editors, and critics here don’t really believe that any real extended presence in space is possible. No wonder we can’t convince anybody else.
Cecelia Holland
Gardner. You and me. Let’s shoot the Moon.
Rachel Swirsky
Well, I guess it depends on who the “we” is in that sentence? Obviously, those who don’t believe it aren’t ...Read More
Read moreContinued from Monday…
Gardner Dozois
It’s impossible to predict what will be technologically possible a hundred years from now. The way things are going, it’s impossible to predict what will be technologically possible five years from now. Research is already underway into creating magnetic/electronic shields to protect ships from radiation; I read an article about it only a couple of days ago.
Starting from the state of technology and scientific ...Read More
Read moreSpace travel is still super rare and super expensive, but there’s some hope on the horizon that the costs may be coming down. If it were reasonably available to you, would you be willing to go into space yourself? For a day trip, weekend trip, months-long grand tour or into the up-and-out explorer? If you were willing to escape our gravity well, which of the sfnal portrayals of space travel ...Read More
Read moreA podcast recorded live at ICFA this past March 2013, this conversation focuses on steampunk. With author Jay Lake and scholar Austin Sirkin, we discuss the international steampunk scene, the history and amorphous definition of the genre, amazing scientific heroes of the past, and nerfpunk, among others.
http://locusmag.com/Blog/LakeSirkin.mp3 ...Read More Read moreIn this episode of Small Blue Planet we visit Israel with translators Gili Bar Hillel and Didi Chanoch.
http://locusmag.com/Blog/SBP05_Israel.mp3Among the interesting bits mentioned:
Conventions: Icon, Utopia, Olamot, Meorot, Bydion Magazines: Once Upon a Future Publishers: Graff Publishing Current writers: Lavie Tidhar, Yir Naniv, Guy Hasson, Vered Tochterman, Gail Hareven, Etgar Keret, Assaf Gavron, Asaf Ashery Abigail Nussbaum’s review of With Both Feet in the Clouds: Fantasy in Hebrew Literature ...Read More
Read moreFive books that really evoke ship life
I grew up on a boat. Tight quarters, sparse living. It wasn’t living aboard a spaceship, and it wasn’t military naval service, but it was a taste of what it’s like to keep your own environment with you. I also spend time working around crew on other ships of various sizes. And one thing that resonates with me are books that give me ...Read More
Read moreThis is one of the panels I recorded at the most recent ICFA conference. The participants (in order of appearance) were Jim Casey, Sharon Emmerichs, Kevin Crawford, Neil Gaiman, and Conor McCreery. How do you adapt Shakespeare? Is there any such thing as a single true, definitive “Shakespeare”? How do the plays adapt into different media, different costumes, different generations? A very thoughtful discussion on the malleable Bard.
http://locusmag.com/Blog/ICFA34_AdaptShakespeare.mp3 ...Read More Read moreIt is well past time for any new comments on Paul Kincaid’s “The Widening Gyre” or Jonathan McCalmont’s response to such, “Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future.” However, I’ve been reading one of Damon Knight’s collections of criticism, In Search of Wonder, and came across the following gems. They come back-to-back-to-back in a chapter on Anthologies, discussing the first three Judith Merrill S-F, the Year’s ...Read More
Read moreThe Five Best… …genre stories about creepy telepathic kids.
Everybody loves a mind-reader, right?
The telepath or mentalist has been a part of the genre landscape since the days of vaudeville and traveling carnival sideshows, where “mind-readers” trained in observation would use shills and accomplices to wow the crowd with amazing displays of their supposed psychic powers. It was understandable that these figures would loom large in the science fiction, ...Read More
Read moreOur guests this month:
Mélanie Fazi is a long-time fan of fantasy, horror and SF as well as a writer and translator. Although her published books include two novels and two collections of stories, she’s mostly a writer of short fiction. Some of her stories were translated in English and appeared notably in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction, Black Static and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She ...Read More
Read moreFive Books/Series That Should Totally Be Adapted With Puppets
Many of us, fans and authors alike, play the dream casting game where we imagine who should star in film or television adaptations of our favorite books. But not all stories were meant for live-action, or even animation. Some stories require the warmth, creativity, and downright fun of puppetry.
At ICFA this past March 2013 we were lucky enough to have three recent Crawford award winners attending the conference: Chris Barzak, Jed Berry, and Genevieve Valentine. (Acutally, there were five winners at the conference that weekend, one of whom was one of our guests of honor, Kij Johnson.) I was lucky enough to catch the three of them after their joint reading on Saturday morning. In a mostly coherent ...Read More
Read moreKaren Burnham Unreliable narrators. Why use them? Is it playing fair with the reader? What stories do it best? Who will mention Gene Wolfe first? (Ah, I guess that’d be me.) Who else uses them effectively?
As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. ...Read More
Read moreFive Animal Stories that Manage Not to Be Twee
Animal stories have a certain quality that really lets writers play with emotions. There’s a reason White Fang and Black Beauty are classics. And plenty of speculative fiction writers have advantaged themselves of the approach. And OMG sometimes the twee factor runs far too high in this. It’s very easy to do in an animal story.
But we do it nonetheless. ...Read More
Read moreIn this episode from Brazil, our guests are:
Fábio Fernandes is an SFF writer and translator living in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s got several stories published in online venues in the US, the UK, New Zealand, Portugal, Romenia, and Brazil. He also contributed to Steampunk Reloaded, Southern Weirdo: Reconstruction, and The Apex Book of World SF Vol. 2. Co-edited (with Djibril al-Ayad) We See a Different Frontier ...Read More
Read more5 sf books worth reading I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered if I hadn’t been reading for SF Mistressworks
I’d always considered myself well-read within the genre, but when people started talking about the poor representation of women sf writers in late 2010/early 2011, I discovered that my own reading was chiefly of books by male writers. And this was despite the fact that through the years my favourite writers had ...Read More
Read moreIn this episode, centered on China, our guests are:
Ken Liu, an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated ...Read More
Read moreFive Obscure Books I Recommend You Read
For my “best of” list, I decided to go out of my way to highlight some titles that readers of Locus are unlikely to have already read. For fans, it seems that their favorite authors are always underrated. Ever hear of Asimov? Gaiman? Uh, yes. Here are some authors, and books, you may not have heard of yet.
The Holy Bile by Cameron ...Read More
Read moreContact Highs: Five Fine Writers of Altered States
Here we go, then: five writers who, I think, write drugs right. I could have added a few more, and I’m sure there must be more that I’ve not yet encountered — I’m disappointed to see I’ve produced a list of white male writers, for a start, and have only my ignorance for an excuse — and so I’d be very grateful ...Read More
Read moreAs a complement to the overall Locus Recommended Reading List, I like to collect all the short fiction that’s easily available online here. Please let me know if any other stories are or become available, and I’ll update the list as soon as possible.
Novellas
Welcome to a new podcast series here on the Locus Roundtable: Small Blue Planet! Hosted by the inimitable and organized Cheryl Morgan, this podcast focuses on international speculative fiction and translations. Cheryl has a good introduction that covers our hopes for the series on her blog. On to our first episode!
Our first guests are:
Jukka Halme: a middle-aged & mild-mannered civil servant by day, an international man of ...Read More
Read moreTeachable Science Fiction and Fantasy
For the past decade, in the Honors College of the University of Alabama, I have taught a weekly interdisciplinary seminar on 21st-century science fiction and fantasy: science fiction in the fall, fantasy in the spring. In fact, it’s generally more limited even than the 21st century; my rule is to include no text on the syllabus older than five years. I break the rule occasionally, ...Read More
Read moreOn the occasion of Graham Sleight’s latest book, The Doctor’s Monsters: The Meaning of the Monstrous in Doctor Who, we talk with Graham and scholar Tony Keen about Doctor Who. We discuss scholarship of the long-running TV show, why it has lasted so long, and who its audience is. I imagine you’ll find some interesting insights within.
http://locusmag.com/Blog/KeenSleight.mp3 Read more
