At BVC, the others decided to commemorate 9/11 on the blog today. I thought about it, and decided that I had nothing to say that hasn't already been said over and over, and further, I did not want to read the news today, or much of anything else about it. (I will do my best to avoid politicians using that terrible day in order to hammer us with ( Read more... )

Riff about it here

Book View Cafe welcomes hard SF writer Linda Nagata--click for her interview.

Here's her bio data, and gateway to her books ( Read more... )

My co-writer Dave Trowbridge has more to say about space opera--with an evocative image that's even better than the 1890 one I found--and it was painted much earlier.

Talking here about why some don't read SF any more, attitudes toward SF, and space opera.

Here's what the program says, under FANTASY DISPLACING SF: Everywhere we turn, fantasy is busting out all over. Of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time, 8 are fantasy and 1 is SF (The other one is Titanic which is, arguably, fantasy). The subgenres of paranormal fantasy, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy have all taken best seller ( Read more... )

Cyrano de Bergerac decoys the determined de Guiche by telling him seven ways to reach the moon, and of those, several must have sounded practical either in Cyrano's time or even when the play was written. When teen-aged Mary Shelley and her companions sat around in Switzerland telling stories because the weather that summer was so inexplicably ( Read more... )