and flights of dynamite blast thee to thy rest
Semi-failed science fiction and fantasy writer, semi-successful local newspaper reporter. Deeply confused most of the time. Only here now for occasional updates. He/him
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and flights of dynamite blast thee to thy rest
THE studio for Canadian childhoods, and maybe yours too đź’”
And yet a trace of the true self resides in the false self
Pessimistic case: even more focus on the author’s autobiography and public persona. Optimistic case: a shift back toward aesthetic criticism and a desire for work that is more individuated and less formulaic/trope heavy/unstylish “invisible prose” writing (thus less likely to be reproduced by LLMs)
There's been a lot of focus on how books will or won’t be written in age of GenAI, but I wonder how the proliferation of LLMs will change how books are received. Especially for the readers--who I think will be the majority--who don't want GenAI-authored text.
This book - half Wu-Tang Clan; half Gene Wolfe - is one of the very best things I've read since opening the shop, & I will be a instant reader of anything Ashante Wilson publishes. Pulpy, sui generis, ecstatic.
Also, you probably aren't an innocent victim here. The places you work and how you spend (or don't spend) money influences this. When businesses, governments, and non-profits give their ad budgets to marketers who are told to prioritize instant short-term results, this is what happens.
I'm very happy to be one of this year's Guests of Honour, alongside Sheree Renée Thomas, Anna Martino, and Trick Weeks! Flights of Foundry is free, online, and a good time. You should totally come
Douglas Coupland pointed out there is no yardstick for Fox's physical and mental achievement – no one else had ever run a marathon a day (42km/26 miles), through all weather conditions, across 5,373 km. On one leg.
THE DREGS A homeless meta noir. About an unhoused man who believes he’s a detective looking for a missing person in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. From myself, @lonnienadler.bsky.social, @ericxyz.bsky.social and Dee Cunniffe.
The wellness industry has long been known to have a not-so-secret love affair with the anti-vaccine movement. thewalrus.ca/wellness-ind...
The ecosystem that used to surface so many stories is almost completely destroyed.
While big national-level outlets have been battered (or in some cases prospered) those regional outlets have been absolutely gutted. Some are gone entirely. Others have gone from close to a hundred editorial staff down to a dozen or so.
One factor in news coverage has always been that local stories could blow up into national and international ones. The workhorses of this type of journalism were veteran reporters at mid-sized regional papers in places like Edmonton, Seattle, Miami, and so on.
I think about this every time I see someone on this site scream self-righteously about "Why isn't the MEDIA covering THIS?" I dunno, let's spend a quarter century gutting your industry and see how well it manages to do anything at all.
This novella does so many things – playfulness with language and genre most notably – and it does them all so well, all while being a rip-roaring adventure, romance, and tragedy.
… I wish I could tell Kai Ashanti Wilson, personally, that this is one of the most beautiful fantasy novellas I’ve ever read. It’s everything I want fantasy to be: strange, mystical, visceral, romantic in flesh and spirit, dense with suggestion and playful misdirection… and gay as hell.
but also, many people seem to be legitimately struggling to find what they're looking for, and book promotion is in a weird place! in some subgenre spaces, it seems to not be allowed to announce that this is a good book of a common kind that people like, it has to be a daring reinvention
I feel like someone at McAuley's publisher really hoped he'd hit it big with a crossover sci-fi/technothriller that could be pushed to mass audiences, a la Jurassic Park. There was a lot of that about in the Aughts; not sure I remember it working out for anyone, actually.
Not McAuley's best book – I think my favourite of his thriller-type books is Austral – but it's perfectly readable and moves like a freight train.
The best/weirdest gag is that their version of the US has clearly visited our world – they call it the Nixon sheaf – but decided to abort their covert mission early. The protagonist had been assigned to assassinate Norman Mailer during his 1960s mayoral run, for some reason.
McAuley lets the deeply disturbing premise sink in like background radiation amid a fast-paced conspiracy thriller – his hero is only occasionally morally troubled by all the alt-USAs he's helped overthrow.
Cowboy Angels is about CIA spooks from an alternate USA where they developed interdimensional travel – and then spent about 15 years spreading truth, justice, and, ahem American hegemony across the alt-versions of a dozen versions of the US.
Did a major clean-out of old books (I now have $90 of credit at the used bookstore) and am now going through a stack of impulse buy books I never got around to reading. Currently: 2007's Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley. This is from McAuley's sort-of technothriller phase.
If you can read Spanish, I hope you like SofĂłn, Issue 1. It includes 17 SFF short stories and poems in Spanish, which I really enjoyed reading, editing, and putting together. SofĂłn is the third speculative fiction magazine from Mexico that pays its authors. I also did the cover art ^u^
film flubs: in the movie spartacus (1960), several different characters identify themselves as spartacus. this scene was mistakenly left in the final cut of the film
Ah, Swanwick! I should have guessed!
For fantasy as a publishing category, that would have likely been true as late as the mid-80s. For fantasy as in "all the major works of fantasy…" man, I dunno. A lot farther back, depending on how you define fantasy.
Read this book or I'll haunt you.
IIRC, early on, the bulk of SF was published in the pulps and there were maybe 10 novels a year. Then the paperback market exploded and "read the entire field" became impossible.
Trying to remember a quote I saw once – someone once said that up until a certain point (around the late 1940s/early 50s?) it was actually possible to read every significant piece of science fiction published in a given year. Anyone remember where this came from?
Alanqa is a very interesting animal, with a slender beak that is 'pinched' at the apex, alongside protrusions that suggest a shellfish-crunching lifestyle. It may also be part of a lineage that led to the giant azhdarchids, and so I reconstructed it as a sort of proto-azhdarch.
Moving on from theropods, we now look at the pterosaurs of the Kem Kem, beginning with the azhdarchoid (?) Alanqa! Some thoughts and size comparison below ⬇️ #sciart #paleoart
Wondering how many people read all the way to the end of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, and realized exactly what was going on in that book, and how much it contributed to the meh reviews it got at the time.
here’s a version where the POV is blacked out whenever the driver takes their eyes off the road
Any journalist colleagues in the Edmonton area who could give this a bit of a push? One of these cats is still missing.
to enter the innermost discourse, you have to whisper your unretractable definition of science fiction, and a number of other literary terms, into the ear of the ilykari priestess
It may be very true that science fiction is a subset of fantasy, but does that mean that a story about climate change is as easily told in the mode of epic fantasy as any other? I can hammer in a nail with a hex wrench, but the hammer is SITTING RIGHT THERE.
I am invested as a nerd in debates over how they might be defined; I am invested as a writer in thinking about how genres are tools that can be used to tell particular stories. The latter seldom comes up in these debates, which bugs me.
I just wrote a blog post about Lindwurmia, the most complete plesiosaur known from the lowermost Jurassic of Germany. www.sachspal.de/lindwurmia-t... #paleontology #plesiosaur #jurassic #Germany
Oh god, they hate the idea of French words SO MUCH!
Yay!
Just remind me again how long it's been since I've watched Bringing Out The Dead, why don't you?
Oh, it's fine. It's just weird, in the ways that social media is always weird. It'd drive me mad if I took it seriously!
Was very excited to learn that I advocate for people exclusively reading the books of dead white men! Had not previously suspected this about myself!
If someone gives Greg Egan a publishing contract again, I promise not to commit discourse again for at least a year, okay?
Being subtweeted by people who are actually important and influential in science fiction is a hell of a thing…
A while ago I did a short series of illustrations showing extinct species coexisting with still living ones in my home country of Brazil, as would have happened around 15-10k years ago. #paleoart #SciArt #artbyjulio
So, writer friends: What are the best platforms for serialized fiction? Ideally free or cheap, ideally with a pretty reader base, ideally with pay what you want monetization options? Genre would be gothic horror/suspense.
Merlin's going to show up with a tranq gun. "Sorry! They got loose, gotta get 'em back home to kick off an ostensibly Christian quest with Celtic pagan overtones!"
bumping to get this to more eyeballs (in theory) (it's also like, the only thing I can think about right now)
Especially b/c the failure to read a novel as SF is something that I think impoverishes the conversation no matter which camp you're in/more familiar with/approach things from. For example: wmhenrymorris.com/nonfiction/W...
I'm not saying anyone/everyone has to do *all* the reading nor that I'm some stellar example of the needed (imo) hybrid approach, but it is useful to have some awareness of SF as mode; literary realism as mode; and, given our current state, environmental/nature writing.
I don't even have any promo links worth putting up, I've got a short story out currently, but it's in Analog. Buy dead tree magazines, I guess?
Me, bored: *rambles semi-coherently about the state of modern written science fiction* The next day… Me: What the hell did I do…
@cloelogan.bsky.social and I were working on a story about cuts to a program that monitors endangered whales. But we were stonewalled by Transport Canada for weeks. Frustrated and wanting to know why, I filed an ATIP. I got nearly 400 pages of emails in response: the dumbest coverup I've ever seen.
This whole thread is fantastic. In the first-ever issue of @typebarmagazine.bsky.social, we had @simonm223.bsky.social come to a similar conclusion and everyone went berserk lol www.typebarmagazine.com/2024/03/24/n...
This is an interesting thread and also interesting as it mirrors a lot of discussions in the literary fiction, which is also dying out as a category in many ways. (Obviously, anyone who has read my novel Metallic Realms knows both of these are conversations on my mind...)
Broader question I'm interested is "where is the art that is thinking the future, and that is thinking the current moment with the full suite of imagination (neither restricted to nor avoiding realism)"; you can make a strong case that was SF for some period, and also that it's maybe now shifting.
Nobody knows everything that came before, & of course we should push back on those bad-faith "testing" canon ideas; at the same time, there's immense worth imo in being conversant with *the thing you are interested in*, and there are predictable & sometimes imo v negative sides to skipping tradition
No updates/no sightings... but thank you to EVERYONE who's looked. We have one trap in the backyard ("smelly fish and water!") and one more is on the way, and my friend M is coming to sleep over for the next few days till I get back. 🥹 I have a good community and good friends I am very lucky
It's just barely possible to imagine The Yiddish Policeman's Union being published as straight sci-fi – barely. Cloud Atlas? Probably not. On the other hand, A Fire Upon the Deep or The Archive Undying being published outside of genre? Nope.
I think my final thought might be that having a dedicated publishing genre gives a dedicated space in which writers can play in certain ways. Sci-fi published OUTSIDE genre has different modes of play. A lot of those are great, and wouldn't be possible INSIDE genre spaces.
But I think there is some value to the conversation-via-stories. To building on what's come before (or violently destroying it and starting over, a la the New Wave, cyberpunk, any number of weird solo literary bomb-throwers).
The idea of genre as a conversation is a double-edged sword. As was mentioned elsewhere (I've totally lost track of response threads) it can be an endless nerd version of drinking each other's bathwater. "Ah, but my version of FTL is subtly different from yours!"
And yeah, I have no truck with the idea that you have to have read "the canon." I believe in personal canons only; the books that make SFF work for the reader/writer etc.
Probably should have said "building on" rather than riffing. Swanwick's essay is largely about how so much of sci-fi literature has been a response – often an angry response – to what came before.
Thinking about this, it's not so much that there aren't new ideas in SFF. It's that they aren't noticed/picked up on. Genre fans don't pay much attention to their avant garde, and that avant garde is in any case very spread out—a lot of innovation happens outside the core genre.
Interesting thread whether one agrees or disagrees. On this note, I tend to distinguish genres in terms of pllting, sometimes theming—quite a bit aside from the set dressing. But does Steampunk have a defining genre characteristic other than "it has speculative steam tech"? I don't know!
Obviously "the death of science fiction" is a bit of a running joke, and people aren't going to stop writing about the future, but I think @matthewclaxton.bsky.social is right that the life of *category* science fiction isn't an eternal given.
Thread up and down. I have reviewed 32 books for Locus so far this year; about 24 of them can be called science fiction (a few you have to squint); only about half of those are genre-published. Where "writing about the future" gets published has changed and might continue to change.
Ok I think /this/ is where I'm getting stuck. I do not think SF's worth is defined by its relationship with the SF of the past, or with the necessity of identity as "within SF"? In fact to some extent, isn't the evidence of vitality the cross-pollination and /not/ just riffing on what's come before?
Hm, yeah, not what I'm trying to get at here, that's for sure. Like I noted farther down, the stuff I call post-sci-fi is usually better written (especially if you look at genre sci-fi in its vast, historical aggregate going back decades).
I should probably write this just to really work out WHY I feel strongly about this, because it's all a bit messy in my mind, TBH.
Someday I need to write an entire thing, I guess, on why I don't particularly care if genre boundaries are broken willy-nilly, but I also, simultaneously believe that there are real strengths to be found in working within a self-imposed genre boundary.
I need to reactivate my old newsletter, I guess (and finally migrate the damn thing off Substack).
Interesting thread (with which I think I tend to disagree), but I’m lingering specifically on this point. Does climate change itself need to be fictional for it to be examined science fictionally in a text? I don’t think so. But that presumes SF is a process not a set of concepts. Idk.
I might be naive, but I think there is a difference between science fiction and fantasy. They are in the same toolbox, but they're designed for slightly different tasks.
…sprawling into the cheap mid-century paperbacks, incubating fantasy literature. Genres have a lifespan, and this might just be it for science fiction's. I hope there's still enough left there to go out with a bang.
So as a big stupid nerd, I am worried that I am going to live to see the death of science fiction, and its partial replacement with post-sci-fi. Maybe it was always going to happen this way. Science fiction as a genre was always a contingent, weird thing, born out of the pulps…
…well, who's going to build on those? Will a relatively disconnected group of authors, no longer tied to a genre identity, be able to add any new riffs to what's come before? I have my doubts.
But the tropes and structures that were laboriously built by the nerd-army of sci-fi writers over a century – alternate history (The Yiddish Policeman's Union) time travel (Ministry of Time, Time Traveller's Wife) post-apocalyptic tales (Station Eleven) cyberpunk (Cloud Atlas)…
Post-sci-fi, as I see it, doesn't mean worse books. (You could argue the actual literary/prose qualities of novels featuring science fiction would only improve, on average, if sci-fi completely collapsed into post-sci-fi.)
I can't see any of that surviving. There are some novels that you can't imagine coming out of anything other than DEEP knowledge of sci-fi. Even Le Guin's Hainish Cycle books would have been deeply changed if they hadn't been in conversation with previous generations of space opera.
This is not a bad thing in and of itself. But it fundamentally changes how literary science fiction – what there is of it – will operate going forward. The genre hothouse, in particular, the idea of novels being in conversation with one another, the bubbling up of new sub-genres?
But do their cover illustrations, jacket copy, marketing, blurbs position them for a sci-fi audience? No. These books are not for nerds who have opinions on which of the three Dune adaptations is the best. They are for mainstream readers first.
This doesn't have anything to do with their underlying literary worth. I liked Ministry of Time fine, and I though The Animals In That Country was one of the best books I've read in the last several years. They're both indisputably, by subject matter, science fiction novels.
Two of the most recent books I've read are The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and The Animals In That Country by Laura Jean McKay. Both are, by virtue of their covers, publishers, and positioning, post-sci-fi novels.
Science fiction's afterlife is going to be interesting, because from the 1990s to now, it's basic tropes have so infiltrated mainstream culture (mostly secondhand through movies, TV, and videogames) that post-sci-fi literature is now a reality.
…attempts to argue otherwise should be treated as arguments for the continuing relevance of the western or jazz in the 1970s or rock music today. Yes, there are still practitioners and fans. But the writing is on the wall.
Science fiction – printed, published science fiction, and sci-fi as a distinct publishing category – is dying. I think it's obvious at this point. It's not dead yet, and who knows, maybe a miraculous intervention could save the patient. But…
Science fiction, meanwhile, has shrunk as a share of the books in the mixed fantasy-and-science fiction shelves. Where they are still separated, it takes up far less room than its younger sibling. (Yes, as a publishing category, SF is the elder, weird as that may seem.)
Meanwhile, fantasy has gone from strength to strength. Consider this – since the 1990s, there have been at least three entire sub-genres of fantasy that have claimed their own spaces in the bookstores: urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and now romantasy.
Mundane SF? Dead on arrival. Cli-fi? Hell, there's nothing fi(ctional) about it, that's just NOW.
The New Space Opera was a genuine movement in the 1980s and 1990s. New Weird's early, semi-inchoate birth-and-immediate-death overlapped with sci-fi but was largely seen as a fantasy/horror exercise by the time it was pinned down.
Consider – how many new sub-genres and literary movements have taken off within science fiction in the almost 40 years that separates us from that moment? Steampunk, maybe? Biopunk and nanopunk, if we're going to grant them the status of genuine movements, and not merely new toys in the toybox.
The year Swanwick wrote that, 1986, was not the last year you could have suggested that SF was in a perpetual state of revolutionary ferment. But it was getting close.
"…where new literary generations arise once every five or so years to challenge the establishment with a new vision of how the stuff ought to be written."
If you don't want to strain your eyes on those first lines, here they are: "It's been said that every generation creates is own horde of invading barbarians in its young. This is certainly the case in the radioactive hothouse of science fiction…"