Here’s my schedule for OryCon 33, Portland, November 8-10:
Friday, Nov 8, 3- 4pm

“Synopsies, Summaries, Book Descriptions and Other Horrors”
Few things exasperate writers more than condensing their masterworks into a single page synopsis - or worse, a 150 word book description. What to include, what to exclude, and strategies to keep it fresh.

Friday ( Read more... )

I'll be at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this weekend. Looks like a very exciting line-up of guests and presentations!

http://eatonconference.ucr.edu/

[I'm excited about being part of this exciting discussion! Particularly looking forward to sharing a platform with my old friend Steve Barnes ( Read more... )

Here’s the list of finalists for the 2012 John W. Campbell Memorial Award (in alphabetical order):

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Kathleen Ann Goonan, This Shared Dream
Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse
China Miéville, Embassytown
 Christopher Priest. The Islanders
Joan Sloncziewski, The Highest Frontier
Michael Swanwick, Dancing With Bears
Lavie Tidhar, ( Read more... )

The editors of James Gunn's new journal, Ad Astra, have invited me to come to the Campbell Conference at the University of Kansas in July to talk about the paper. (Dates are July 5-7.)

Their acceptance of this article gives me renewed enthusiasm for the whole project which, as many of you know, originated in a series of online blogs on myth, memory ( Read more... )

Tomorrow I'm off to the Mission Inn in Riverside where UC Riverside is hosting the annual Eaton Conference on Science Fiction. I'm not participating in any panels or giving any presentations this year, so this should be for enjoyment only -- if I can stand listening to so many scholarly papers on SF. But I am actually contributing to the conference ( Read more... )

It gives me great pleasure -- as one of this year's judges of the Campbell Award -- to announce the winner: Paolo Bacigalupi, author of The Windup Girl. This novel emerged early on from the pack of 2009's SF novels, and at least for me became the standard against which all the others were judged. (There were some wonderful SF novels published, so ( Read more... )

On Tuesday,I took part in a science fiction panel that was the opening act at UC Riverside's Writer's Week. The university's Eaton Collection houses the largest collection of science fiction manuscripts, books and memorabilia west of the Mississippi (and maybe in the entire country). Rob Latham, the conference's organizer, gave us the opportunity ( Read more... )

Just updated my website to show four appearances in the near future. All relevant info is to be found here:

http://sff.net/people/sheila-finch/

I'm off to UC Riverside today for the Eaton Conference. I was at the very first one in 1979, courtesy of a dean who gave conference info and travel money to a part-time teacher. This was the same dean who let me teach creative writing and the literature of science fiction, both when I was still part-time. He believed in the right person for the job ( Read more... )