Category: Writing
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High Stakes Boredom
One thing which has begun to bother me about a lot of recent science fiction and action films is that they always go straight to putting the whole world in peril. In Guardians of the Galaxy the climax is an attempt by the villain to destroy the Good Guy Planet. In Interstellar the hero is…
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Arisia 2015, Featuring MEE!
The venerable Arisia convention gets underway at the Westin on Boston's waterfront tomorrow, and once again I will be a program participant. If you want to see me perform for your entertainment, here's where and when the monkey will dance: Friday (January 16) at 5:30 p.m.: Do We Need Science Fiction? Panel discussion on whether…
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Diversity and DragonCon
In recent years the cozy cameraderie of the science fiction world has been disrupted by controversies over diversity and tolerance. We've been told that SF is too white, too male, and too straight, and that we need to Do Something to change that. I'm not going to grapple with the question of whether the demographics…
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I Have Joined the Pod People
I have left the silent era and entered the world of podcasting. Rob Wolf interviewed me for his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy podcast. You can go here to listen to me talk about A Darkling Sea, Aztecs, why roleplaying games are different from novels, Bone Wars, my obsession with getting stuff right,…
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Double-Barrelled Short Fiction!
It has been quite a while since I've published any short fiction, but now I have two stories coming out back to back. In September the valiant War Stories anthology from Apex Books hits the beaches, and my story "Contractual Obligation" will be in the first wave. The operation is led by tactical masterminds Jaym…
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No Royal Road
On May 19 the staff of the Tilton Library in Deerfield were kind enough to host me for a reading and brief lecture about my novel A Darkling Sea and my forthcoming book Corsair. If you were at the library, you can probably skip the rest of this 'blog post, but if you're among the…
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Invoco Legem Magicarum!
. . . as Mandrake the Magician used to say. Kinetic fantasy author Max Gladstone wrote an interesting post about "Magic Systems and the Wizardsroman" on his own blog. He's interested in the connections between story and How Magic Works (that is, how the fictional magic operates within a fantasy story), and it started me…
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On the Verge of Great Events
Most of us remember history as a series of Big Events: wars, revolutions, inventions, disasters, and so forth. (Historians in recent decades have done an immense amount of really amazing work studying day-to-day life in the past, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them aside from other historians.) The trouble with Big Events…
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Japanese Hamburgers, Hard SF, and Getting Things Right
The most recent issue of Smithsonian magazine had an interesting article about some Japanese fans of particular types of Americana — like hamburgers, bourbon, jazz, and denim. You can read it here so I don't have to summarize. It's a neat article, and it connected up with some other threads inside my skull. Second thread:…
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Promotional Round-Up
A little housekeeping here. I'll be a guest at Lunacon in Rye, New York this coming weekend (March 14-16). If you're in the area, come and hear me talk about games, time travel, and Gravity, among other topics. You can also hear some expert science discussion by Dr. Diane A. Kelly. March 30 I'll join Brian…
The Cambias Digression 