There's been a lot of talk about us entering a new Greater Depression. And similar to my own website dedicated to looking at the survival skills that got our grandparents through the Great Depression of the 1930's, some writers are suggesting that we take a look at the books from the era before and at the beginning of the Great Depression to better ( Read more... )

Over at Sarah Hoyt's blog, Jeb Kinnison has some interesting thoughts on the relationship between LitFic ("liter'chur," "serious fiction") and the various speculative fiction genres, and how it relates to the current controversy over the Hugos:

I’m one of those people who straddles STEM and the literate arts with reasonable skills and interest in ( Read more... )

Satire is a particularly difficult type of humor to write. One must keep the story absurd enough that no reasonable person would mistake it for actual advocacy, yet not let it get so over-the-top that the reader begins picking it apart (Marion Zimmer Bradley's admonition that "suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by the neck until dead ( Read more... )

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was instrumental in exposing the horrors of the GULAG under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, has died at the age of 89 ( Read more... )