Tag: science fiction
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The Many Americas of ’90s Sci-Fi: Babylon 5 as SF of the Present
I recently re-watched Babylon 5 as a precursor to diving back into SF&F story-writing (after taking a month off to work on humanist essays and podcast prep for a project launching in November). The following is a reflection on what our SF legacies can teach us not just about the genre and its histories, but…
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Classic Sci-Fi in Clarkesworld April 2021
I enjoy reviewing Clarkesworld on an issue-by-issue, because there’s plenty to learn from quality curation of today’s SF&F, and Clarke’s organization of stories and related content into even more thought-provoking wholes more than meets that requirement. Clarkesworld tends to range between hard sci-fi to lyrical sci-fi, with horror and fantasy more often showing up in…
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Writing Futures from the Present
Lately I’ve been processing the strong possibility that I won’t get to keep my new home in Colombia (at least, not full-time for a few years), and it’s been difficult to focus on writing in the middle of this grief. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that I’m currently working on my entry for Grist’s…
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Lessons from Lessing: In Search of My Golden Notebook
I can’t remember who recommended Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) to me as a teen, but I read it during a period when I was glutting myself on mid-20th-century British authors (Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble being two other stand-outs; Beryl Bainbridge, I’d meet only in my late 20s). The Golden Notebook is most…
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Reading in Context: Cultural Backdrop for Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006)
A few weeks ago, a Twitter conversation about Ray Nayler’s new series of author-chats launched a surprising confluence of SF&F-community excitement around Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006). This book, which explores a first-contact scenario that asks serious questions about human consciousness and its relative cosmic value, won a handful of nominations when it was published —…
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Fumigative Futures: A Companion Piece for “Mercy and the Mollusc”
I was in-transit from Medellín to Bello, rushing from one appointment to the next, when I noticed the launch-announcement for my latest novelette at Clarkesworld, “Mercy and the Mollusc”: a meditative space western involving a man and a giant… well, mollusc. Amusingly, too, the announcement arrived within minutes of receiving a rejection for “Fumigative Futures”,…
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Science Fiction Mysteries (a.k.a. Genre is a Construct)
It’s been said that “all stories are mystery stories” — a charming idea, for reasons I’ll discuss today, but also too prescriptive, so let’s modify it from the outset: “all stories can be mystery stories”. There’s a lot to love about looking at literature this way, both as a reader and as a writer. Stories…
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The Writer Returns to the Scene of the Theme
So, it’s five days until Third Planet Fall Down releases, and I’m chuckling today over how difficult it is for a writer to escape who they are in their writing. The “work will out”, as the saying goes — and oh my, does it ever, when it comes to being made to confront our greatest…
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Of all the lengths that SF&F can take…
One of my favourite points of literary confusion between English and Spanish is that a “novel” in English is a “novela” in Spanish… but a “novella” is treated as quite a different literary category in the English-speaking world. For Nebula-Award-nomination purposes, a “novella” is a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words. (In Spanish, the term…
Sí, Hay Futuros Ediciones 