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Larry Niven on the Implied Contract Writers have with Readers

Via Stephen Herreid, I saw this post from the Writers of the Future, a long-standing program that seeks to identify and promote new science fiction and fantasy authors. WofF has lots of judges, and I’m sure that not all of them would agree with Larry here, but this is

Fenton Wood's Yankee Republic Coming in Paperback

Author Fenton Wood is currently running a Kickstarter to bring his Yankee Republic series to paperback. I’ve reviewed Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves and Five Million Watts, and I really need to publish my thoughts on the other volumes in the series. The Yankee Republic is a favorite of

Penny Dreadfuls

So despite what I just said, I am going to look to something G. K. Chesterton wrote almost 120 years ago, because it is still true. And while I appreciate JD Cowan’s analysis of what went wrong in popular culture in the last twenty years, in another sense very

A Coming of Age by Timothy Zahn

A Coming of Age by Timothy Zahn [Amazon link] is exactly the kind of thing Tim Zahn is good at writing: a whodunit with a science fiction milieu and a heavy dose of intrigue. Is is also further evidence that Zahn is the most consistent sci fi writer in the

Linkfest 2020-11-27: Black Friday Edition

The Dispossession of the Post-war Boom A look at what changed in one neighborhood in Buffalo between the 1920s and the 1950s, as reflected in the houses buit. Lore and RPGs The Last Redoubt offers up a defense of not investing too heavily in lore, the background information of RPGs,

Emperor Norton Ponders Thick and Thin Descriptions

Earlier this month, Emperor Norton wrote an absolutely fascinating blog post on the limits of description in fantastic literature. Norton promised a follow-up on creating dense descriptions, but in the interim, Norton has written a further exploration of the limits of description that contains an assertion that clicked with me:

Pelicans in Tim Powers' Dinner at Deviant's Palace

Aaron Irber asked me yesterday on Twitter whether Gregorio Rivas’ violin-like pelican in Dinner at Deviant’s Palace is a reference to the medieval representation of the Passion of Christ by means of a pelican feeding its young by piercing its own breast and allowing them to drink the blood,