The Science Fiction Renaissance: Who is Our Messiah?
I had a rather strange and characteristically “me” conversation with my friend Adam the other day about the state of science fiction as a genre. One thing that keeps coming up in our conversations is how fantasy has seemingly abandoned the trappings of respectability for the more lucrative pursuit of market share, while science fiction […]
Lambda Literary Award: Celebrating the LG, Kicking the BT in the Ass
I won’t profess to understand the full history of the Lambda Literary Foundation (to which the award belongs). As a Foundation that has in recent years honored lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and other-sexuals (genderqueer, etc.) writers, the place is near and dear to my heart. But then they announced this: LGBT authors will be recognized […]
An Addendum: The 2011 Hugos
Eileen Gunn was kind enough to put me in my place on Google+ last night. And let’s face it, after a lot of what I said about categories I know nothing about, nor, obviously, have any connection to, I really should have taken my shoe out of my mouth and found a better place for […]
2011 Hugo Awards: My Thoughts
(I’ve added an addendum to this post in order to pull my foot out of my mouth. Feel free to read it after you read everything below.) I stayed up nice and late in order to watch the event live, which may or may not have been a mistake. Now that I’m wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, […]
Cyberpunk ≠ An Aesthetic/Visual Movement
Follow science fiction long enough and you’ll notice a trend: most people, by default, associate the various generic traditions of SF with aesthetic or visual qualities. We see a spaceship or a robot or an alien species or a ray gun or whatever and immediately think “this is clearly science fiction.” In many respects, this […]
An Addendum: Categorizing Fiction
One of the things I wanted to talk about in yesterday’s post on why the best fiction fits somewhere was my personal take on dividing books by generic category (in bookshops and elsewhere). But then I thought: why not offer my brief take and then see what you all think about the issue in general. […]