Traditional publishers don’t like hard SF, says an author with a creative writing MFA: Which raises a question. As writers decry the decline of hard SF, you’ve got to wonder how many traditional publishers think like her – that The Martian had no market? How many reject hard SF because they think
WIRED has written another ‘Puppies are evil’ screed about the 2015 Hugo Awards controversy: There are many reasons why I might be “angered” by previous Hugo winners. And none of them are anything to do with ‘the increasingly multicultural makeup’ of the awards: ONE Science fiction’s most prestigious
Have you had short stories published in the last few years…? If so, I probably want to hear from you. I’m doing a bit of casual journalism – researching how the market for short genre fiction is changing. I’ve interviewed four writers of short fiction so
Event China is ‘not frightened to fight a war with the US’, according to the Guardian today. The comments – in a state-run Chinese newspaper – came twenty-four hours after the US deployed a warship into a contested region of the South China Sea. The territorial contest
A rare selfie… taken at the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican earlier this month. I don’t normally take pictures of myself, but the last fortnight is the healthiest I’ve felt for four years, thanks to injecting Humira in preparation for IVF.
I spent a thought-provoking weekend at the Battle of Ideas: Write up to come, but blogging has been slow. [Image taken from @Traci_the_weeb on #battleofideas]
Kameron Hurley writes in a Q&A on Reddit: You don’t see as much of this obsession with gore and chopping off limbs and selling wombs in my work prior to the year I started dying. It all hinges on that, on that sudden knowledge and
Anyone old enough in the 1980s will probably remember the computer game Zork and the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson. They’re examples of “choose your own adventure” stories where players make choices, and how the story ends depends on their decisions. Text-based games dropped out of fashion as
An American visited England and his Facebook post went viral: The reason they drive on the left is because all their cars are built backwards You can read the rest here. As someone living in England, he’s 99% accurate. He’s wrong about Bose speakers, but only rich people
Because I’ve got to beta test a Twine story this evening… I leave you with some deep thinking on the topic of whether dogs can – and should – pilot their own jetpacks. Here is a video of a jetpack/wingsuit being piloted over Dubai. I