THE SMILING MUSEThis has become a day of excellence ( Read more... )

Happy New Year, dearest friends, readers. Happy Befana to the Italians; Women's Christmas to the Irish; actual Christmas to the Orthodox -- tomorrow that is ( Read more... )

God's War

You'll get no spoilers from me, no matter how much you beg!

Kameron Hurely's God's War has some great worldbuilding. A mostly female run society has been warring for centuries against a male-run equivalent on a planet barely fit for human habitation. Really interesting stuff.

There was a purely personal downside for me: an awful lot of the ( Read more... )

I remember this particular character from John Brunner's magnificent dystopian novel, Stand on Zanzibar. He spent his life permanently hooked into a tv channel and drugged up to his eyeballs. Every few chapters he appeared, shaking his head and exclaiming, "Christ! What an imagination I've got!" The channel that inspired such amazement in his drug- ( Read more... )

 I'm still digging through Mary Beard's absolutely intriguing Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. Every chapter is a challenge to the way I create the imaginary towns in my current work in progress. I have a character who is a baker, so where are the mills in my cities? Who does the banking? How are the streets cleaned? I find myself furiously ( Read more... )

a) Jenni was trying to cross the road, a flat transport corridor, along which vehicles similar to large, manually controlled robots -- each containing one or more humans -- a species descended from hairy beings that liked to climb trees, I'll explain "tree" later.

She -- by which I mean that Jenni, belonged to one of only two genders, the one known ( Read more... )

 There are dozens of ways to build a world, but my own personal favorite involves a starting point of one or two very simple rules from which everything else can, and must be, derived. I followed this approach with The Inferior, but there are lots of more famous examples out there.

One of the most amazing feats of worldbuilding ever achieved, in my ( Read more... )

Jack Vance has an amazing ability to sketch out bizarre and fascinating cultures, whether human or alien or magical. A great many of his stories show off this talent by having the protagonist traipse from one amazing society to the next and the next. He tosses them off like they're nothing to him. "Ha, ha!" he says. "I've got a million of 'em," and ( Read more... )

Getting the future wrong is a hazard for SF writers. Oh, it can take a few years to be caught out, but sooner or later we all end up with Atomic rockets and Ray guns, but no mobile phones. It's part of the fun.

For me, the most exciting SF world-building is not about scientific advances, it's about how deep those advances go, how they change human ( Read more... )

Two Cities, Venice and Neverness: one real and one the setting of David Zindell's magnificent series, A Requiem For Homo Sapiens. What do they have in common? Both should have been hell-holes. A swamp, a frozen wasteland. But instead their inhabitants built homes that had more in common with poetry than cities.


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