fjm has two posts about meta-textual stories and stories which glorify terrorism.

One of the story's mentioned in the former thread is hal_duncan's 'The Disappearance of James H'. It sprung to my mind too and I wrote about it here. For me this is the best piece of fiction Duncan has done. However his non-fiction continues to be highly readable, most recently ( Read more... )

hal_duncan on hype. (As you might expect from Duncan this is quite very long.)

Nelson's Column is protected by illegal wood. Whoops.

Down with Hegel! A very interesting op-ed from the Vicar of Putney. A sort of follow up to this: Is Rowan Williams a humanist mole?

imomus on rhyming police advice. I'm not sure when risk management got conflated with ( Read more... )

coalescent took advantage of my absence at the end of last week to post all sorts of interesting things I couldn't reply to. One of these was on the topic of the phrase "self-indulgent" as used by critics. (There are many more blogosphere posts on this that are linked within.) Personally I was surprised so many people were against the term. I was even more ( Read more... )

hal_duncan on fans:The media has the same reaction to SF/F it does to any circus side-show of overgrown adolescent freaks and geeks, the same reaction it had to glitter-spattered glam fans outside Bowie concerts in the 70's, or the Tartan-clad fans of the Bay City Rollers. It points a camera, describes the scene with wry dismissive amusement, and comes up ( Read more... )

The mundane keeps rolling with a long post attempting to classify the different levels of Mundane SF. I'll be honest, I couldn't make head nor tail of it and it does not look like clarification will be forthcoming.

A particular stumbling block for me was the Zeroth Order. In the comments to that post hal_duncan has a lengthy and interesting response to this ( Read more... )