Karen Burnham

“… and I haven’t even started on poetry.”

If anyone would like to follow up on Guy’s post (near the end of the previous discussion) and mention any poetry that they find useful/inspirational, I’ll happily run that as an extra discussion. I feel that poetry is often sadly neglected, and that it is critically important for writing beautiful prose.

Terry Bisson, Guy Gavriel Kay, Gary K. Wolfe, Cecelia ...Read More

What non-fiction books/magazines/journals have you found particularly valuable? This could be in terms of researching a novel, for understanding literature (genre or non), for teaching, or for general insights about the world.

Gardner Dozois, Cecelia Holland, Elizabeth Hand, Karen Lord, Ellen Klages, Guy Gavriel Kay, Peter Straub, Cat Rambo, John Clute and others chime in with their thoughts. As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease ...Read More

Welcome to another single-author focused edition of the Locus Roundtable. This time Greg Egan is in the spotlight, as I egregiously abuse my position by wrangling some very kind individuals into talking about my personal current obsession. Participating in this discussion are Gardner Dozois, whose early championing of Egan’s short fiction helped to make him one of the more influential sf authors of the 1990s; Kathleen Ann Goonan, author of ...Read More

This pair of comments is the last entry in our series on intersectionality (Part 1, Part 2, and Part Lovecraft).

John Clute

Another slight problem with “intersectionality” over and above problem of reinventing the wheel. (Parenthetically, one is constantly brought back to wonder if any of us has ever said anything not already said in Vienna and Prague before the WW1 snuff flick.) The other slight problem is the fact ...Read More

These comments were part of the discussion on Intersectionality (Part 1 and Part 2), but I thought they might make an interesting series on their own.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

This puts me in mind of the recent controversy (now entirely moot) over Guillermo del Toro’s plan to put a female character in the period geological expedition in his adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, even though there was ...Read More

This post continues on from the previous Intersectionality discussion. 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. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

Karen Joy Fowler

When I think about identity with respect to myself I get some slippage    ...Read More

Here’s a crunchy topic to start off 2012. We’ve had a reader request (from Nisi Shawl) for thoughts on intersectionality. She defines it thus:

There’s probably a better definition out there, but to my mind, “intersectionality” refers to the idea that one can relate to numerous sorts of marginalized identities, and that the effect of these marginalizations is synergistic–and needs to be seen as such. For instance, my identity ...Read More

I know that we’re all busy with year-end stuff: year-in-review bits, best-of-the-year bits, and for the academics, grading! Always fun. As such, I’d like to throw out a fun topic to polish off the year:

What’s the silliest thing that: a) an editor has said to you (for the writers); b) a writer has said to you (for the editors); or c) a student or teacher has said to you ...Read More

This is the final spin-off thread of the conversation that has appeared in three previous Roundtables (one, two, and three.)

Karen Burnham

When I first came across the original question, I had in mind the sort of genre books that eventually become canonized classics even in non-genre reading programs. Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Left Hand of Darkness are the four that first spring to ...Read More

This discussion is a follow-on from the two Roundtables posted last week (here and here). The comments below focus on how writing exists in the marketplace, and the adjustments that various writers make to accommodate that fact. Gardner Dozois, Cecelia Holland, Rachel Swirsky, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Guy Gavriel Kay, Gary K. Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, James Patrick Kelly, and Tim Pratt all feature in the conversation.

As always, this discussion is broken ...Read More

This discussion follows on from the Roundtable on Genre Accessibility posted on Wednesday. In today’s installment, Karen Joy Fowler, F. Brett Cox, Elizabeth Hand, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Guy Gavriel Kay, Russell Letson, Rachel Swirsky, Cecelia Holland, Rich Horton, Siobhan Carroll, N. K. Jemisin and John Clute all join the discussion, which focuses more on ‘mainstream’ writers using genre materials.

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease ...Read More

A question came up: Has contemporary science fiction become too self-absorbed, or does it still have the capacity to cross over to a mass audience? If so, who are the authors and books that have managed to do so? And who do the folks in our Roundtable discussion group think are likely candidate to break out of the genre and find a large non-genre readership in the future–and why?

Cecelia ...Read More

The last installment of the Roundtable left off with Jeff Ford’s comment about how schools seem to fail to turn kids into lifetime readers. This opened the discussion out in interesting directions, and it’s where we’ll start off today.

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 ...Read More

Karen Burnham

While I was away I ran a series on the Blog about science fiction for children, everything from age 0 (picture books) to around age 10 (middle grade, I’m told). The parents and kids contacted came up with some great responses, some of which I’ll be looking to order from the UK and Australia! However, we got a significant number of comments asking why we weren’t talking more ...Read More