I think the mood of the country is drifting from “how can we fix it” to “how bad is it going to get?” It seems the choices we’re being given are between Ford and Hoover, Gas Lines and Bread Lines, 1974 vs 1934. Well, I’ve been pondering some warning signs, Read more…
This has been flying under the radar unless you’re like me and you follow uber-geek podcasts like I do. However, the US government has been quietly pressuring our friends and allies to sign on to a lil treaty called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is the wonderful little piece Read more…
A recent email reminded me of a panel I was on at at Context. The subject was about making dystopias, which seems an oddly timely subject. One of the things we discussed a little bit was the fact that there can be a number of different kinds of dystopia, depending Read more…
Just to let everyone know, my book trailer for Prophets has been posted on Bookscreening.com which is a great site if you’re interested in book trailers. I appreciate them putting it up. I’ve also put up the home page for Prophets, along with the trailer.
I don’t think anyone would say I’m easy on the characters in my books. Almost all of them, in fact, are put through several flavors of hell before the end. I have noticed something lately, a developing trend in my more recent work, that has bearing on the kind of Read more…
I now present to you some choice quotes from Mr. Horace Engdahl, senior member of the awards jury for the Nobel Prize in literature: Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the Read more…
There’s a bias in SF and its brethren such as alternate history to do world building around the big ass stuff; wars, revolutions, catastrophes. Or, for the sciencey mindset, the big ass discoveries that change our understanding of cosmology or fundamental physics, or some sort of massive engineering or computing Read more…
I’ve made the point before that I believe that it’s the economists who deserve the bulk of the blame for the current crisis, those practitioners of the black arts in the Federal Reserve and in our major financial institutions are the ones with the blood red ink on their hands. Read more…
Just a note on a little experiment I am doing. One of the useful bits I got from Context (aside from reminding various people that I still exist) was a talk on effective blogging given by Toby Buckell. One of many points he made was the idea that regularity was Read more…
According to Charlie Stross: We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF. He has a few points about the hazards of planning a near-future SF novel in a plausible fashion, the most important IMHO being the long Read more…