Roots and Story
By Carrie Vaughn
I used to not think too much about setting, about how a strongly anchored setting—and an author’s personal connection to a setting—could contribute to a story. Sure, there were isolated examples of writers who are so strongly linked to a setting that their writing has come to define a place and time: Dickens’ Victorian London, for example. But since I grew up as an Air Force brat, I had a pretty rootless childhood, never identifying very strongly with any one place. I figured that aspect of writing would never really be available to me.
Read more >>
Frederik Pohl’s best friends in SF give back in Gateways!
By Elizabeth Hull
To celebrate my husband’s 90th orbit of the sun, I’m proud to have persuaded eighteen of the top writers in science fiction to contribute a story, and then to write an afterword, for this special anthology. Moreover, there are nine other appreciations of Fred, and these non-fiction pieces are exciting for me and for any serious fan who wants to know more about how we got where we are today in this literary movement Trufans call SF. For example, the memoirs by Bob Silverberg, Jim Gunn, Gardner Dozois, and Harry Harrison—themselves highly influential people who helped make the genre more respectable around the world—tell as much about the field and the way it was cultivated as they do about Fred and the way he encouraged each of them personally.
Read more >>
Space Cadets and Starship Troopers
By Stacy Hague-Hill, Your Captain for this Journey
Sometimes, a topic comes along that’s just too big for one article.
In August, Tor will be releasing an all-new, first-ever authorized biography of a towering figure in the history of the genre: Robert A. Heinlein.
So, as our own little celebration of the man and his works, we thought it would be fun to find out just how much of an impact Heinlein’s stories and novels had on a number of our—and your—favorite sf writers. We asked them a simple question—what’s your favorite Heinlein novel?
We’ll be posting their answers once a week as we build toward publication of the biography, and I hope all of you will jump in and let us know if you have any favorites, too.
But enough about us. What’s your favorite Robert A. Heinlein novel, David Brin?
Why another vampire book?
By Alex Bledsoe
When I recently published this post on my blog, I got a tweet from screenwriter/author Melissa Olson saying, “I don’t know, I feel like THE question is: how can you write a new book about vampires when vampires are EVERYWHERE now?” The more I thought about it, the more it did, in fact, seem like a good question.
Read more >>
Not the Contents, Just the Box
By Lee Carroll (Carol Goodman and Lee Slonimsky)
Given that we’re a married couple who met as teacher and student in a mystery writing class (Adult Ed, no grades, no dating until the class was over!) in 1994, perhaps it’s surprising that we took so long to try our hand at collaborating on a novel. One of us had been the informal editor of the other’s fiction for many years, and the other had played a similar role with poetry, but collaborating on a novel was NOT something we’d flirted with or bounced ideas off one another about. It came up mysteriously, at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa CA in November of 2007, where we had gone to read at Copperfields bookstore and to record a poetry reading for a local radio station, KRCB-FM. Collaboration grabbed hold of us then and we’ve never looked back.
Read more >>
|