Category: Writing
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 2!
I got up early and had a swim in the hotel pool and a substantial breakfast (the breakfast menu at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown is an exact duplicate of the breakfast menu at the Boston Westin Waterfront hotel, which implies they both buy from the same food-supply company). Then off to the convention center…
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Golden Gate Blues: The Untold Story
Anyone who's interested in learning the Secret Backstory of my short story "Golden Gate Blues" can find out on the official 'blog of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where there's a brief interview about How I Did It.
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At Your News Stand Now!
The March/April 2016 issue of the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is on sale now. It's a double-sized issue packed with some great stories — all fantasy and science fiction, by an odd coincidence. And one of them is my own "Golden Gate Blues." Buy it, read it, enjoy it!
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Writing Myths and Legends the Marvel Way!
It is almost a truism nowadays that comic books have taken over mass culture. Most of the highest-grossing films of the past few years have either been directly adapted from comic books, or inspired by their style of headlong action. Even a title as obscure as Guardians of the Galaxy became a billion-dollar "media property."…
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Star of Blog and Podcast
There's a new podcast up at New Books in Science Fiction & Fantasy, with me in it. I was honored to find out that I was Rob Wolf's first repeat podcast interviewee (podcastee?). In this one we talk about Corsair, the Hieroglyph Project, and the chip on science fiction's shoulder.
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Accidental Prophets and Texas Sharpshooters (Part 4 of 4)
Having thoroughly demolished the branch of literature I've spent forty years trying to master, let me build it up again. How can SF encourage and influence new technology? Recall that Stephenson listed two "theories" in his essay. Hieroglyphs and Inspiration: the idea that people become interested in science and technology because of exposure to science…
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Accidental Prophets and Texas Sharpshooters (Part 3 of 4)
Last time I explained how the Hieroglyph anthology didn't accomplish its goal, because of the very nature of science fictional prediction. If you look at those iconic Hieroglyphs from my earlier list through the lens of metaphor and plot device it becomes quite clear how many of them were invented as story elements first and…
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Accidental Prophets and Texas Sharpshooters (Part 2 of 4)
(Note: this essay can be read in its entirety at the Hieroglyph website.) In my last post I described the history of the Hieroglyph Project, and ended by saying that it failed. How did the Hieroglyph anthology fail? It's full of great stories, it got good reviews and it sold well. By any normal definition…
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Accidental Prophets and Texas Sharpshooters (Part 1 of 4)
One thing I've discovered about being a science fiction writer is that it somehow makes me into a futurist. Because I write stories with spaceships and aliens in them, people think I must have some kind of inside line on how the world is going to look a century from now. In fact, that seems…
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Morons With Bullhorns
A few days ago John Scalzi put up this blog post, commenting (in the usual tail-chasing fashion of the Internet) on someone else's Twitter comment about yet a third person's magazine article — all wrestling with the question of whether writers should or should not try to be apolitical. John says no. I disagree with…
The Cambias Digression 