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Author Interviews at Writing Raw
Writing Raw is a free literary e-zine, and they’ve just posted a new batch of “7-Question Interviews” with authors, including David Drake and Tad Williams. They’ve also got archived interviews with Jasper Fforde, Nancy Kress, L.E. Modesitt, and quite a lot of others. The site itself, although suffering from 1999 Navigation Syndrome, appears to be…
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Talk Like Warren Ellis
The other day I was telling Shadow about some of the people I follow on Twitter. I mentioned that one of them was Warren Ellis, and he asked me why I followed him. Because here is an example of one of his recent tweets: Good morning, fluorescent sex weasels of the internet. It’s a new…
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Book Blog Bonanza
The Crotchety Old Fan is guaranteeing that he’ll never lack for blog posts* by taking John Ottinger’s List of Book Review Blogs and doing capsule reviews on all of them. Here are his first three installments: Recap Day 1 Day 2 Keep an eye on his site for the rest. There are all kinds of…
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The Clockwork Century
Author Cherie Priest has written several stories set in the same alternate history/steampunkish milieu, including novels Boneshaker (due out in October) and Dreadnought (due in Fall of 2010). She’s put together a site devoted to the stories’ shared world. Here, it is 1880 (or thereabouts). The Civil War is still underway, drawn out by English…
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Make Yourself a Little Something
Cory Doctorow’s new novel Makers will be published in October, and as a runup to the release Tor.com is serializing the book on its site. They’ve also created an online tile game which is being serialized along with the book. A total of 80 weird little illustrations were created, one for each chunk of the…
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Review: In the Courts of the Sun
IN THE COURTS OF THE SUN Author: Brian D’Amato Hardcover: 704 pages Publisher: Dutton Adult; March 26, 2009 This is a fairly long review, so if you’re reading this for a simple thumbs up or down, let’s get that out of the way right now. Yes, this is a genre book. Despite an understandable, potential…
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Author August Starts Tomorrow
The 2009 edition of The Science Fiction Message Board’s “Author August” kicks off tomorrow, with a different author highlighted every day. Everyone is encouraged to post “photographs, reminiscences, cover scans, links to appropriate sites, reviews, and other reactions” about the author on their designated day. Here’s the list: 8/1 Alfred Bester 8/2 William Tenn (Phillip…
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Where I Write
Photographer Kyle Cassidy was invited to a party at Michael Swanwick’s house in 2008. While there I asked if I could see his Hugos, since I knew he had five of them. “Of course!” he said, jovially, and lead me up to his office. This I thought in stunned wonder as my eyes crept across…
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Speculative Fiction Tropes
TV Tropes (whose horrible power xkcd summarized rather neatly here, so beware) has a whole section devoted to Speculative Fiction. Transplanted Humans Long ago, visitors came down from the stars, and took humans (and possibly other Earth species) away to other worlds. Now that we have the ability to travel between those stars, we keep…
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Author Recommendation: Neal Asher
Several months ago I wrote an opinion post recommending a number of currently working UK genre writers to North American readers. At that time I threatened to post, weekly, a brief synopsis of their work to date in alphabetical order, and reasons why North American fans should read them. Unfortunately, my time herding skills fell…