Linkspam is really tired of pledge week
Some links on Teh Future of Publishing:
SF Signal asks a bunch of people and gets a wide range of responses. I prefer Nick Mamatas', although some of the others are... well, huh. ::cocks head sideways:: Off-kilter, I think, is probably the kindest word for them. (As I told
mme_hardy, I suspect the only people reading Orson Scott Card in thirty years will be the 13-year-olds who read everything in the SF section of the library, and the only book of his on the shelf will be Ender's Game.)
Jim Hines walks himself back a bit on his discussion of downloading and piracy (and yeah, I think that's absolutely related to the question of the future of publishing).
Also, In the year 3030, Everyone Will Still Read, by Brendan Koerner, guest-posting at TNC's blog.
And by way of Koerner's post, a long interview with John McPhee in the Paris Review, offered mostly because It's John McPhee, although he does comment on the internet and books and so forth waaay down in the interview. Happily, his thought is much the same as that which I consider to be cofax's law: in X years, we'll still be writing. Although his of course is much more wonderfully phrased: But it's just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It's a fluid force: it'll come up through cracks, it'll go around corners, it'll pour down from the ceiling.
And a reference to John McPhee gives me a great segue to William Langewiesche, whom I think is one of the best of McPhee's successors in the field of long-form nonfiction. Here is a piece by Langewiesche (whose name trips me every time I try to remember it) about a record-breaking surfer. (I haven't read it yet, but it's just the sort of thing I like to read.)
A review of a new book about writing on the sentence-by-sentence level. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. Heh. (OK, ew: when I copied & pasted that sentence into my Notepad file, I got a VERY ANNOYING notice from the Financial Times telling me I should respect their copyright. ::growls::) (Link via Bookslut)
Speaking of the mechanics of writing, Strange Horizons has a great quote from Kim Stanley Robinson about the practice known (somewhat derisively) as infodumping. Hmmm, says I. I also recommend the discussion in the comments.
And looking at those two last links in sequence, I see support for a kind of prose that I'm only moderately comfortable with writing, and can only take as a reader in digestible bits. (I have tried multiple times to struggle through Henry James, and it's like sawing through concrete for me.) My practice has always been to strip away the extraneous, keep the prose lean and uncluttered, but this kind of discussion makes me think about what it would take to go the other direction. Huh.
*
Vintage Space talks about terraforming Mars, the hows and whethers.
BoingBoing has a photo gallery of a Bolivian protest against a ban on coca-leaf chewing. I gotta say, I'm with the Bolivians. When I was feeling crappy from altitude sickness in Peru, the thing that got me through a long bus ride over a 16,000-foot pass was a handful of coca leaves to chew. (The coca-leaf tea, which we drank everywhere, didn't seem to do much good, I have to admit.)
ESPN on the coded homophobia in the recruiting for women's basketball. ::facepalm::
*
And now it is my weekend, woot, and there's a bottle of wine and some Max Headroom calling my name. Hope y'all have a good one.
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments; comment here or there.
SF Signal asks a bunch of people and gets a wide range of responses. I prefer Nick Mamatas', although some of the others are... well, huh. ::cocks head sideways:: Off-kilter, I think, is probably the kindest word for them. (As I told
mme_hardy, I suspect the only people reading Orson Scott Card in thirty years will be the 13-year-olds who read everything in the SF section of the library, and the only book of his on the shelf will be Ender's Game.)
Jim Hines walks himself back a bit on his discussion of downloading and piracy (and yeah, I think that's absolutely related to the question of the future of publishing).
Also, In the year 3030, Everyone Will Still Read, by Brendan Koerner, guest-posting at TNC's blog.
And by way of Koerner's post, a long interview with John McPhee in the Paris Review, offered mostly because It's John McPhee, although he does comment on the internet and books and so forth waaay down in the interview. Happily, his thought is much the same as that which I consider to be cofax's law: in X years, we'll still be writing. Although his of course is much more wonderfully phrased: But it's just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It's a fluid force: it'll come up through cracks, it'll go around corners, it'll pour down from the ceiling.
And a reference to John McPhee gives me a great segue to William Langewiesche, whom I think is one of the best of McPhee's successors in the field of long-form nonfiction. Here is a piece by Langewiesche (whose name trips me every time I try to remember it) about a record-breaking surfer. (I haven't read it yet, but it's just the sort of thing I like to read.)
A review of a new book about writing on the sentence-by-sentence level. If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. Heh. (OK, ew: when I copied & pasted that sentence into my Notepad file, I got a VERY ANNOYING notice from the Financial Times telling me I should respect their copyright. ::growls::) (Link via Bookslut)
Speaking of the mechanics of writing, Strange Horizons has a great quote from Kim Stanley Robinson about the practice known (somewhat derisively) as infodumping. Hmmm, says I. I also recommend the discussion in the comments.
And looking at those two last links in sequence, I see support for a kind of prose that I'm only moderately comfortable with writing, and can only take as a reader in digestible bits. (I have tried multiple times to struggle through Henry James, and it's like sawing through concrete for me.) My practice has always been to strip away the extraneous, keep the prose lean and uncluttered, but this kind of discussion makes me think about what it would take to go the other direction. Huh.
*
Vintage Space talks about terraforming Mars, the hows and whethers.
BoingBoing has a photo gallery of a Bolivian protest against a ban on coca-leaf chewing. I gotta say, I'm with the Bolivians. When I was feeling crappy from altitude sickness in Peru, the thing that got me through a long bus ride over a 16,000-foot pass was a handful of coca leaves to chew. (The coca-leaf tea, which we drank everywhere, didn't seem to do much good, I have to admit.)
ESPN on the coded homophobia in the recruiting for women's basketball. ::facepalm::
*
And now it is my weekend, woot, and there's a bottle of wine and some Max Headroom calling my name. Hope y'all have a good one.
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments; comment here or there.