Crossing Genres: Is Cross Genre SF Killing Science Fiction?
Somewhere in the genre community there is someone blaming the death of science fiction on all those bastards mixing their filthy mysteries and romances with the hardcore awesomeness of SF. I don’t know where they are, but knowing the SF/F community as well as I do, I have no doubt that they exist, frothing at […]
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Five): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk C)
Now we come to the crux of the cyberpunk movement: its death. Cyberpunk was, unfortunately, always a movement that was losing momentum as it gained it. Even Gibson saw the looming death of the subgenre. He said so during a book signing some years back that I attended; he remarked that he had always considered […]
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Four): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk B)
(Here begins the second part of my conceptualization of cyberpunk. Expect these sorts of things to be irregular, but at the same time a part of this blog, because much of what I will be doing as a graduate student is exactly what I am doing here, but simply on different subjects. This is, for […]
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Three): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk A)
To define cyberpunk is to literally take up the foundations of science fiction and say, “this is it, and there are no other options.” Anyone who attempts a definitive definition to science fiction will know how ridiculous this is to accomplish, particularly because no two individuals will agree. Cyberpunk is to punk what science fiction […]
First Time Novels: Small Press or the Big Boys?
An interesting thought occurred to me only moments ago: when it comes to considering publishing your first novel, how do you decide on what kind of publisher to select? It would seem, at least to me, that many automatically send their work to the big boys, get rejected, and then sit around bitter, or self-publish, […]
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Two): The Past (Punk)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the strange words and concepts we have so gloriously accepted into pop culture were actually understood as the culturally/socially complex entities that they actually are by the same people that pass around the suffix “punk” like a beer keg at a frat party? Indeed, it would, but the curious thing […]