Scott Westerfeld Guest Post–“Sisters and Family in Spill Zone”

Spill Zone is about what we’re left with after our family is destroyed.

It’s about two sisters, Addison and Lexa, who’ve lost their parents and hometown in an event called the Spill. The older sister, Addison, is left with the task of raising and providing for Lexa, which is in some ways like trying to keep a culture alive. Every family is its own world, after all. Only the people ...Read More

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Salik Shah Guest Post–“Unmaking the Post-Truth World With Global SF”

Mithila is a glorious kingdom ruled by philosopher kings in the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Millennia later, say in an alternate universe, it’s a decolonized terrain beset with intolerance and violence, a symbol of a civilization in decline.

Science fiction and fantasy that draws its power from actual science and history—a scientific spirit based on evidence, logic and rationality—could be a fluid and powerful language of protest in the new era ...Read More

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Jess Nevins Guest Post–“How It All Started”

1905 was a landmark year as far as global pulp culture was concerned, because that was the year that Street & Smith, at the time the purveyor of a number of very successful dime novels, decided to expand its operations into Europe. The countries of Europe had not been without their own versions of dime novels, in some cases for decades, but Street & Smith–which was looking to expand its ...Read More

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Steve Rasnic Tem Guest Post–“The Long Gestation Period of UBO”

The journeys taken by my most recent novels from idea to completion have been lengthy and complex. Deadfall Hotel (Solaris, 2012) began as a novelette first published in Charlie Grant’s Shadows series in 1986. My southern gothic Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014) started with a few paragraphs written during my senior year in high school in 1968. And now comes UBO (Solaris, February 2017), a dark science fictional exploration of violence, ...Read More

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Chuck Wendig: An Invasive Interview

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Jaym Gates Guest Post–“The Landscapes of Horror”

The most frightening self-inflicted experience of my life was when I developed an unfortunate taste for horror fiction as a teenager living in the middle of nowhere, California. I snuck The Oath, by Frank Peretti, out of my grandparents’ library and read it in the evenings, when I was supposed to be taking care of the horses.

For those who’ve never read the book, it’s about an impossibly powerful ...Read More

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J. Daniel Batt Guest Post–“Towards the Frontier”

The Santa Lucia mountains hug the California coastline between Monterey and San Luis Obispo and stare out at the dark, cold waters of the Pacific. For centuries, perhaps back to the Chumash legends, lore tells of dark figures materializing upon the edges of these mountains to gaze across the ocean. When the early migrants came to California, these figures were waiting for them. The myth of the Dark Watchers was ...Read More

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Josh Viola Guest Post–“Cyber Punks”

Full disclosure: My story “wysiomg” appears in the forthcoming anthology Cyber World co-edited by Josh, but that wasn’t the motivation for this post, which covers the sort of material I would normally wish to bring to the attention of Locus readers.–Alvaro

 

One particular night a couple of decades ago officially branded me a cyber punk.

I was about ten years old and hosting a sleepover in my family’s single-wide ...Read More

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Sharman Apt Russell Guest Post–“BFF: Science Fiction and the Environmental Movement”

In 1864, a hundred years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, the American scholar George Perkins Marsh wrote about the impact of a society rapidly cutting down its forests, destroying its topsoil, and polluting its water. Marsh thundered, “The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature has established, and she avenges herself upon the intruder by letting loose her destructive energies.” He predicted ...Read More

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Ada Palmer Guest Post–“World Building and Change in Terra Ignota”

I started going about building the science fiction future for my Terra Ignota series, not by trying to predict things that will happen, but by looking for things that have already been changing in the last two centuries, and will with certainty be different in some way in the future. This is a different way of thinking about plausibility, one that comes naturally to me because I’m trained as a ...Read More

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Gregory Wilson Guest Post–“Creativity and Collaboration”

Most of the time, authors are used to flying solo. Well before we start thinking about submitting work for publication, we’re scribbling in journals, writing poems mostly for ourselves, coming up with characters and places and plots for short stories and novels which we think are cool—us, not some mythical other reader who floats in the aether, ever out of reach. As we mature as writers we become more aware ...Read More

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Appreciations for David G. Hartwell (1941-2016)

We received more appreciations for the late David Hartwell than we had room to run in our March issue, but would still like to share them with our readers. The following memorials from his friends, admirers, and colleagues are just a small part of the outpouring of appreciations for his life. Further appreciations are welcome in the comments.–Locus

 

Chuck Gannon

I generally do not write memoriams. My first and ...Read More

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Lisa Goldstein Guest Post–“Traveling in History”

There’s a passage in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost that gave me pause when I first read it:

“For I must tell thee, it will please his grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement…”

Thank goodness for the glossary, which defined “excrement” as meaning “that which grows out (such as hair, nails, feathers).”

I bring this up ...Read More

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Lawrence M. Schoen Guest Post–“The Book in the Drawer”

I started writing Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard late in 1989. I’d been writing short stories for a while, but hadn’t sold any. I’d recently completed my doctorate in cognitive psychology and was teaching at a small, liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida, and to this day, more than twenty-five years later, I really can’t say what made me decide to write a novel. But I did.

And it was horrible. ...Read More

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Ann VanderMeer Guest Post–“A Universal Condition”

One thing about fantastical fiction that I like is it’s a universal condition — you find examples from all over the world of writers expressing themselves through the fantastical because sometimes there’s no other way to get across a unique idea or perspective. Everywhere, too, this impulse or way of thinking about the world is different — sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in vastly different ways. So in addition to ...Read More

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Rodolfo Martínez Guest Post–“Twenty Years Ago…”

Note: Special thanks to Steve Redwood for his assistance with the translation of this piece.

Between 1985 and 1994 I wrote, more or less, a novel a year. All of them, except Cat’s Whirld and Jormungand, have been lost. Although not completely; somewhere there are typed copies of a few of them, or parts of them; and many of the themes, situations, and incidents of the majority of those ...Read More

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Kit Reed Guest Post–“How I Learned to Write”

For me, it was all about learning, never about teachers, but I couldn’t stop hoping there was a magical How-To-Book-That-Explains-It-All-To-You. Or a great coach who would love to tell me all about How It’s Done.

P.S., there wasn’t, although there used to be a Famous Writers School claiming that for a down payment and your monthly contribution, they would. I did a story about their correspondence course for the New ...Read More

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Nathan Ballingrud Guest Post–“Horror and the Small Press”

Horror is the unloved hound of literature. It’s hard to find it in bookstores, beyond the names that have been representing the form since the seventies and eighties: King, Rice, Koontz, and Barker. Forget about specifically designated shelves; those days are gone. It’s got a bad reputation. Some of that’s due to the lingering effects of the paperback horror boom of the eighties, which nearly choked the market to death, ...Read More

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Dale Bailey Guest Post–“Calling Timothy Zahn”

Timothy Zahn saved my life.

The story was called “Unitive Factor,” and Google tells me that it appeared in the May 1982 issue of Analog. To be honest, I can’t remember much about it, but the space horses made a hell of an impression. That’s right, space horses: giant vacuum-dwelling whale-like creatures that could jump instantaneously from one star to another, handy for harnessing to your space craft if you ...Read More

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Cat Rambo Guest Post–“Not a Straitjacket”

I was lucky enough to be at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend, and one of the highlights was a panel on diversity, with fellow panelists Jamie Ford, Ramon J. Terrell, Garth Reasby, and Sarah Remy, moderated by Anna Alexander. It wasn’t the only panel on diversity–there were, by my count, four panels that touched on the topic over the course of the three day con.

I wanted to share ...Read More

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Silvia Moreno-Garcia Guest Post–“Say No to Strong Female Characters”

I was not a fan of The Book of Life. I will not elaborate too much on this point except to mention that when I watched it I recalled a bit from an article by Sophia McDougall published in The New Statesman:

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.

“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense ...Read More

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Una McCormack Guest Post–“Writing Within Boundaries: The Challenge of Franchise Fiction”

I often think of writing as a process of entering into a contract with your readers: when you persuade someone to read your work, you’re making promises to them that your work will deliver in certain ways. Certain genres, it seems to me, make specific contractual demands on a writer–for example, I doubt that Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light is going to end with Henry VIII abdicating and ...Read More

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Alex Shvartsman Guest Post–“The Art and Science of Anthology Editing”

Now that I have five completed anthologies under my belt, the number of questions I get–from friends and strangers alike–about various aspects of anthology editing has turned from an occasional drip to a steady trickle. And while I would love to presume it’s because I’m such an awesome anthologist, the truth is, there’s fairly little information on the web regarding this niche topic. I thought it might be a good ...Read More

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A Cheery Holiday Roundtable

In December 2014 I approached our esteemed panelists with the following:

On his blog Michael Swanwick recently addressed a reader-inspired question: “How do I cope with the despair endemic upon being an unpublished or little-published writer?” In an essay first published in 1991, Robert Silverberg wrote about spending his adult life as a successful professional writer but still facing the “long despair of nothing well.” The word “despair,” and related

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Roundtable on 2015 Releases

Being close to the end of the year, it occurs to me it might be interesting to talk about some of the books we’re most looking forward to in 2015, and why. I will mention three to get the ball rolling. Daryl Gregory’s Harrison Squared (March 24, 2015). I love Daryl’s writing, and this Lovecraftian teen story promises to be dark, comical and poignant all in one. Kit Reed’s Where ...Read More

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A Note About Asimov’s Essay “On Creativity”

In late October various fine publications (including this one) reported that a previously unpublished essay by Isaac Asimov had appeared in the MIT Technology Review. In a prefatory note to the essay, Arthur Obermayer describes how he was the one who suggested, back in 1959, that Asimov be approached to join a group of “out of the box” thinkers on an ARPA-related project. Asimov participated briefly, and wrote the piece, ...Read More

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Roundtable on Lucius Shepard

On March 18, 2014, Lucius Shepard passed away. Since then a number of touching tributes have been penned, focusing on his life, personality and accomplishments. I thought it would be fitting for our Roundtable group to celebrate Shepard’s rich literary body of work. What are some of Shepard’s finest pieces, and why are they worth visiting and revisiting? Overlooked or out-of-print gems we should hunt down? Where should readers unfamiliar ...Read More

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Roundtable on Ten Exciting Writers

At the 2014 Cannes film festival press conference, film-maker Quentin Tarantino talked about how he periodically puts “the state of film under a microscope.” Riffing off an e-mail exchange he describes, I’d like to pose the following forward-looking question to this group: Who are the ten currently working writers that most excite you today? To be more specific: these should be writers about whose every new work you feel genuinely ...Read More

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Daryl Gregory and James Morrow in Conversation

Daryl Gregory: We’re having this conversation by email, but I’m going to pretend we’re sitting in a bar. Even though we live in the same town, and not even a very big one — that’s State College, Pennsylvania, for you readers — I think we see each other more often in other cities, at cons. Is that sad, or just typically science fictional?

James Morrow: I think it’s both sad ...Read More

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Two Mini-Roundtables: Award Jinxes and “The Future of the Mind”

1) Award Jinxes

The 2014 Academy Awards made me think of various “curses” that have become associated with the Oscars over the years—the “F. Murray Abraham syndrome,” for example, named after the actor, on failing to develop a high-profile career after winning the award, or the “Oscar love curse,” a superstition regarding the Best Actress categories that foretells an imminent divorce after receiving the statuette. Are there any such jinxes ...Read More

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Roundtable on Samuel R. Delany, Grand Master

In December 2013, Samuel R. Delany was named Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by SFWA. Delany has influenced science-fiction and fantasy, and literature in general, in different ways—as fiction writer, critic, theorist, memoirist, editor, teacher. How has Delany influenced your own work or views on writing and literature? For readers who haven’t read much by Delany, is there such a thing as a Delany “gateway” story, novel or essay?

Rachel ...Read More

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Roundtable on "Planetary Writing" and SF in 2014

In The Economist‘s recent “The World in 2014” issue, Jonathan Ledgard writes:

“Dystopian literature will lose out to more optimistic fare in 2014. In part this shift is attributable to readers’ fatigue with mutant, vampire and (particularly) zombie stories. Mostly, though, it reflects a move in the popular consciousness from civilisational angst to the question of preserving biodiversity.”

Later, Ledgard concludes, “2014 will mark the rise of planetary writing: high ...Read More

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