The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard My rating: 2 of 5 stars Read for the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge and the SF Masterworks Reading Challenge. Method of the world’s destruction: fluctuations in solar radiation melt the polar ice caps, causing massive flooding in most of the world’s major cities, rising heat, and heavy rains that […]
Read More Book Review: The Drowned World by J.G. BallardOriginally posted on Notes From The Slush Pile:
So submissions for Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores reopened recently, and I’ve already spotted a trend in the Slush Pile irritating enough to make me jump back into the blog, despite still being on holiday. Unconvincing and poorly written characters and settings can ruin any story. I…
A good article from my friend A.M. Offenwanger about the unreality of realism and why Princesses need pristine hair.
Read More On Princesses and the Unreality of RealismSo I’ve been kicking around this idea for a steampunk/magicpunk series for a few years (since 2012, it turns out). I was intending to sell a couple of stories to some magazines to build interest, then publish a book that was a collection of short stories. But instead I’ve been collecting rejection slips, and those […]
Read More So I’m Writing a Magicpunk Kindle SerialThe Many-Colored Land by Julian May My rating: 4 of 5 stars Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge, the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Challenge, and the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge. This novel won the Locus Award and was nominated for a bunch of others. My first acquaintance with the work of […]
Read More Book Review: The Many-Colored Land by Julian MayThat’s what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there. Anne McCaffrey
Read More What Writing is All About, After All…I apparently read a lot of outstanding books over the course of the year and simply could not pick a top ten list! More than twenty of the 56 that Goodreads tells me I read (my goal was 50,) I gave a rating of five stars to. And choosing which ones stayed with me the most between […]
Read More I Tried to List the Top Ten Books I Read in 2016, But…MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge and the Second Best Reading Challenge. Method of the world’s destruction: ecological devastation, corporate greed, and a mad scientist’s bioengineered supervirus. This book was my last hurrah for 2016; I’m not […]
Read More Book Review: MaddAddam by Margaret AtwoodAn excellent article on asexual/ace characters in popular and speculative fiction from Tor.com. Article: Five Books Starring Asexual Protagonists from Tor.com
Read More Five Books Featuring Ace ProtagonistsA thought-provoking article worth considering. Some of their data isn’t quite up to date, but this doesn’t hurt the article’s ideas or sentiments; though the simple answer for why we’re not doing all this is not that the points aren’t valid, and that some of these speculations may well be correct, but we’re literally looking […]
Read More Are We Looking for Aliens in All the Wrong Ways?
