2) While linking to Ellis' Lupercalia statement, I found this link. Sweet canary conniptions! We have finally arrived at non-Animatronic robotic performers! Well, South Korea has. Given the review of this thespian's performance, and proclivity to knock stuff over on stage, I do not foresee a musical revival of RUR coming to Broadway anytime soon. Well, maybe with Keanu Reeves as the star. . . .
3) I am all signed up for Readercon. I don't see Chip Delany or Paul Park on the guest list yet, but I hope one or both of them can make it. The highlight of the con for me last year was talking to Mr. Delany and thanking him for the inspiration he has given me as a writer. I'm happy to see Lucius Shepard on the list for this year; I definitely want to meet him, since he is another one of my inspirations.
4) A taste of courtship in 2015, courtesy of Paleo-Future.
5) io9 has a great piece on PKD's The Man in the High Castle, which is also about the tension between the idea of the genre as showcase for the future and an author writing in and about the present. It could be a bit more in-depth, but the authors gets points for slipping in an Ezra Pound invocation (Degree of Difficulty: 7.8). I've been thinking about alternate history a lot today, partly due to Jay Lake mentioning his novella "America, Such as She Is," and partly due to me then reading some reviews and discussion about it, and partly because I got an idea for an alternate history story that goes somewhere neither Lake nor Jo Walton in her excellent Half a Crown trilogy venture to in their explorations of WWII What Ifs. But it would require a Super Star Destroyer load of research, so I'm just putting some notes in a folder for later.
If you have never read Dick's take on alternate history, best go read it. The idea that is invokes of "how nebulous reality was about to become" is certainly a central concern in many of Dick's novels, but this particular approach to it has neither the dizzy paranoia of, say, Valis, nor the "are they or are they not human" question behind Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's about questioning the solidity of reality, the malleability of the future. It is provocative on multiple levels, and oddly inspiring in how it deals with historical turning points.
6) Finally tonight, John Scalzi brings together both the Great E-Book Kerfuffle and authors giving out advice in one blog post. I found the linkage so compelling that I then wrote a response nearly as long as his post, one which was completely ignored by all other commenters. I think I have to learn to either be more interesting, or be pithier and more controversial. But I thought my point, which was that the situation would impact new writers in a number of ways, and thus the way they received and used advice from more established writers, seemed salient. But please note, I will NOT be writing about that for either my FoG or Apex blogs. I kinda want to, but I need to move on.
Currently, I am trying to put The City & The City down, partly as an example for my next Apex column, which is going to be about how authors portray and use "worlds within/parallel to worlds." It will make more sense when I write it, but the examples will be Mieville's book and Star Trek's Mirror Universe.a sort of "When Unfamiliar Worlds Collide." Really, it'll make sense.
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