thoughts and opinions by author s. andrew swann
S Andrew Swann | July 8, 2010
I’ve been light blogging the past few weeks because, even though I’m done with Messiah, I’m not done with Messiah. Even though the draft is finished (so no one needs to worry about me pulling a Robert Jordon) I’m still in the midst of going through and polishing off the edges of the draft. I’ll [...]
S Andrew Swann | June 13, 2010
If you’re a writer populating these here interwebs, and you don’t know about the site TV tropes, you should do yourself a favor and rectify that right now. What is it? It is a wiki that deals with, well, tropes in fiction: character types, situations, plot devices and so on. And, despite the name, it [...]
S Andrew Swann | June 2, 2010
I can see why a lot of people would hate it. But then, again, there are certainly arguments for what they did end up doing. Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a good long time afterward thinking [...]
S Andrew Swann | April 23, 2010
(with thanks to Instapundit) Thanks to an NPR article we have a concept worthy of a Phillip K Dick novel, with Orwellian commentary that should scare the crap out of you if you have any imagination— or remember the CIA’s history dealing with other chemical substances. The money quote: Does Biology Affect Our Trust In [...]
S Andrew Swann | April 21, 2010
I’ve be asked again to provide mental melding on the SF Signal blog. The topic this time is “The Coolest Robots in SF.“ I’ve cross-posted my entry here, but you should go see the rest: The coolest robots in SF? That’s a tall order. The field is vast, including everything from the ambulatory logical puzzle [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 17, 2010
I09 led me to a post by Ian Sales about the dreaded Info Dump: Unless the writer has chosen to use an outsider as a protagonist – a common trick in fantasy, but much less so in science fiction – the only way the reader is going to learn anything about the world of the [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 10, 2010
Remember Rollerball? The original 1975 version with James Caan? One of the interesting premises of the movie was the collapse of the nation-state in favor of the corporation. That premise was somewhat prescient, anticipating one of the main tropes of cyberpunk by almost a decade. The idea is commonplace now, a shorthand for some deep [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 3, 2010
Today I’ve a guest blog post up @ SciFiGuy.ca wherein I go and mull over my current obsessions on religion and space opera in the Apotheosis Trilogy. Can you write SF about religion? It’s an interesting question because when people tend to think of Religion and SF, it almost always in terms of opposition. It [...]
S Andrew Swann | February 1, 2010
I recently read a rather interesting sfnal riff on Obama’s state of the union speech, based on an administration reference to a “New Foundation”: But I recall reading here or somewhere that Paul Krugman and several other leading economic and legal academic-policymakers had come to their professions wanting to be … Hari Seldon. Deeply attracted [...]
S Andrew Swann | December 30, 2009
Someone has again scratched a pet peeve of mine, that old pseudo-literary bugbear “relevance.” As in, SF is losing it, and it better get some quick or else be declared “irrelevant.” This is a bit of an oversimplification of the essay by Jetse de Vries, Should SF Die? But it pretty much encapsulates my problem [...]
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