Emphyrio by Jack Vance My rating: 3 of 5 stars Read for the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club. I had a really hard time getting into this book. At first I was ready to dismiss this whole thing as a bunch of right wing propaganda claptrap. Ghyl, our protagonist, […]
Read More Book Review: Emphyrio by Jack VanceKAMERON HURLEY’S SCIENCE fiction novel The Stars Are Legion almost never saw the inside of a book store. She came up with the idea in 2012, but she and her agent didn’t think anyone would buy it. A “big gory political space opera” wasn’t something flying off the shelves at the time. But two years […]
Read More Space Opera Fiction is Back & Better Than Ever!Science fiction has a reputation for being a field that has traditionally been entirely dominated by white heterosexual cisgender men, both in terms of its writers and its protagonists. It’s a reputation that the whole field has been working very hard to leave behind. One often wonders (at least, I do,) how it got that […]
Read More One Reason Why Science Fiction Was Traditionally Racist — MaybeIt is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. ~ Arthur C. Clarke
Read More Putting Things in PerspectiveThe Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut My rating: 3 of 5 stars Read for the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge and the Second Best Reading Challenge at Worlds Without End. I had to struggle to determine what I was going to give this book as a rating. I can’t say it was a bad book, […]
Read More Book Review: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt VonnegutStar Songs of An Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Reading Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge, and the Collections! Reading Challenge at Worlds Without End. Two of the novellas in this collection were also counted towards similar, but not the […]
Read More Book Review: Star Songs of an Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr.Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars SPOILER ALERT! Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Reading Challenge, the Big Fun in a Little Package Novella Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge, and the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge at Worlds Without End. I could […]
Read More Novella Review: Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.It seems that I’ve been hearing an awful lot about pulp fiction, especially pulp sci-fi, recently! All of a sudden it’s like everyone’s talking about it! As I’ve mentioned, I’m doing some writing for the Tales of the Stellar Deep RPG, which is clearly rooted in pulp sci-fi and horror. All of a sudden people […]
Read More Is Pulp Fiction Making a Comeback?And Canada too, I think. Or maybe it rubs off on us. Seems particularly poignant at this moment in history.
Read More The Cult of IgnoranceIllustrator and game developer Aaron Siddall has commissioned me to write flavour text for the game he’s developing, Tales of the Stellar Deep. Ray Gun Gothic meets the Cthulu Mythos! Here’s a primer on what Ray Gun Gothic is all about: “The future was a chrome-trimmed triangular window in the front of dad’s car, and […]
Read More Ray Gun Gothic
