Discussions

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

Karen 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

One 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

Following 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

How 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

Continued 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

Continued 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

Space 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

Karen 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

Here’s a fun conversation to finish off 2012. I once saw a bunch of suggestions for the proper collective noun for monsters (i.e., instead of a ‘murder of ravens’, a ‘mash of monsters’ or a ‘terror of monsters’, etc.)

Anyone want to take a crack at a collective noun for aliens?

Gardner Dozois: If they’re the kind from Alien, “An Outburst of Aliens” would seem appropriate.

Gary K. Wolfe ...Read More

This Roundtable is a spin-off from the earlier discussions on Reviewing and Spoilers last week.

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.

Russell Letson

I note that in the television world, reviewing ...Read More

This conversation is a spin-off from the earlier discussion of Reviewing.

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.

John Clute

Proposal. Try to think of a single review which lacks spoilers that ...Read More

Karen Burnham

Reviews and reviewing. Why do we do it? Who is it for?

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.

Paul Di Filippo

I personally review for two reasons: 1) to ...Read More

As part of the current series on SF In (and Out) of Translation, I asked the Roundtable to talk about some of their favorite international sf authors.

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 ...Read More

Karen Burnham

Karen Joy Fowler points out this clip from a recent, controversial Andrew O’Hehir review of the Avengers:

At what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and important…. It’s a neat little postmodern trick, actually, to simultaneously position this movie as ...Read More

Fabio Fernandes is in the middle of a fundraising effort to support a special International issue of the magazine Future Fire. Here’s a description of his project:

We are still at war in many places around the world, but something is a-changing: the socialist Second World has ended almost 25 years ago, and the First World and the Third World are, if not changing places, suffering major alterations in their ...Read More

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