Beaker Sings Dust in the Wind

I come up for air long enough to present you with this...



Now back to book with Friday deadline.

Finches Rock

Best SF/F v.4 Cover

Man, I can't wait to read this. I missed a lot of good stories this year:

Anno Iron Man Continues

Here's the cover for my novelization of Iron Man 2, appearing in your neighborhood bookstore on April 1:

Anatomical Figuration of Amazon/Macmillan

Bookninja, which is always worth reading, on the Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle that will determine the course of Western civilization: "Somewhere around the duodenum, Amazon’s foot, which had apparently entered through its own mouth, met Macmillan’s foot which, as we saw yesterday, entered through Amazon’s rectum, and the two are having a kungfu battle amid the half-digested remains of America’s mid-list novelists. Heady stuff."

As one of those mid-list novelists (I think), I feel threatened by this image but consider it appropriate.

100 Stories for Haiti

Buy this book when it comes out. Not because I have a story in it ("Snapdragons," reprinted from the Vestal Review), but because it's a good thing to do.

Indomitable Iron Man B&W #1 Preview

A couple of pages--cover and title--snatched in the dark of night (actually on a brilliant and frigid seaside morning) from Comic Related.

Alanis Morissette is the Dark-Haired Girl

This conversation with writer/director John Alan Simon has me real real interested in this movie version of Radio Free Albemuth, which occupies a strange place in the PKD canon. Odd to see it being the first of his books to get a serious and faithful* film treatment.

*(Blade Runner being serious but not ultimately faithful due to the absence of Mercerism and Joe, and...well, lots of things, among them electric sheep. Read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? if you don't believe me.)

The Perils of Eclecticism

Quoth Paolo Bacigalupi in a recent Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast:

I think almost all of the big respectable science fiction and fantasy magazines have the same exact problem which is that they're eclectic. And, eclectic products have a much harder time finding an audience who will follow them.

Part of me wants to work out a reasoned and thoughtful response to this. Part of me wants to kind of despair because I think Paolo is (mostly, more often than not) right, and my output is nothing if not eclectic. But if I had to write the same kind of story over and over for the rest of my career, I'd quit writing. Apparently eclecticism will doom me one way or another.

[from io9]

Every City Its Own Genre!

The most excellent supernatural/noir novelist Charlie Huston tells the Austin American-Statesman that LA is a more SFnal city than NYC, which is one reason why his most recent book, Sleepless, is SF. He moved to LA, it seems, and the SFness of the place overcame him.

This got me thinking. Which is America’s most science-fictional city?

After trying out a number of candidates, I realized I couldn’t decide because there were so many cities that seemed SFnal in different way. From this realization I formulated a theory that goes something like this: All American cities are in some way science-fictional, but that each city in America has a kinship with a particular subgenre of SF.

So here’s an experiment. Below is a list of the thirteen largest urban agglomerations in the United States, per the Census Bureau. Next to it is a list of thirteen SF subgenres. Match ‘em up!

New York LA Chicago DC/Baltimore Boston Bay Area Dallas Philadelphia Houston Atlanta Detroit Seattle Minneapolis

Space opera New Wave Cyberpunk Apocalyptic Post-apocalyptic Utopian Dystopian Steampunk Retro-futurist Transhumanist Alternate history Dying Earth Edisonade

(Another way to play this would be to look around you and create your own genre for the city where you live. But that’s another post, and probably one you should write…)