SF Signal: SF Tidbits for 9/8/07

SF Tidbits for 9/8/07

At SciFi Wire, John Joseph Adams profiles Karl Schroeder, author of Queen of Candesce.

MobileRead lists 10 Reasons Why Paper Books Suck.

New SF/F Titles at ManyBooks.net: "Beyond the Vanishing Point" by Raymond King Cummings, "The Hunters" by William Douglas Morrison, and "Cubs of the Wolf" by Raymond F. Jones.

Jonathan McCalmont wonders why he should care about women writers in science fiction. [via Sean Wallace]

Here's a work-in-progress list of Women eligible for 2008 SF Awards.

Suite101 offers these tidbits for sf/f writers: The Dos and Don'ts of Battle Scenes ("Don't. Please, oh please do not give your readers a dry, blow-by-blow account of the action. This approach is boring.") and How To Write Character Backstory ("If you are a writer and have never gamed, it would be worth your while to check out how a character sheet is made and use some version of it in your character files.").

Chris Roberson continues his series of posts on dead proposals with this one for the Marvel Ultimate universe. "...all I wanted to do was write a Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD story, which is readily apparent to anyone who reads the pitch. This is a spy story in superhero drag, and the bad-ass 'Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury' is the pivot around which the plot turns."

Mister Roy provides a fascinating and very detailed account on his thought process used when purchasing a genre book, in this case Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley. [via Brian Ruckley, who also points us to an excerpt for Winterbirth]

Here is Daneel Lynn's essay for a Science Fiction Studies class: How to Understand Science Fiction in a Science Fiction Reader's Way?. I love the quote from Edward James's Science Fiction of the 20th Century (1994): "it is ultimately the [determined, not the occasional or accidental] reader who decides what belongs the genre [science fiction]'".

Mike Brotherton points us to two galleries of crappy science fiction & fantasy book covers: The Best (Worst) Fantasy & Science Fiction Book Covers by Cracked magazine (or are they still doing that "mazagine" bit?) and this gallery Punk Rock Penguin.

Neatorama shows how you get a monster in the mail.

MonkeyFilter points us to this longish-but-cool article on the pre-digital era effects used in Star Wars and Close Encounters.

Spiderman Tobey Maguire is interested in producing a film version of Robotech. [via SFX]

SciFi Scanner has the scoop on Thomas Edison's Frankenstein.

Collider has the poster for Family Guy's take on Star Wars. [via TheForce.net]

If you want to read SF that will inform either directly or indirectly about what it's like to be a middle class white guy at the beginning of the 21st Century then SF has your back.

However, if you want to read a story informed by the experience of what it's like to be a woman living in the 21st Century then you're a lot less well served.

Huh?

I thought most people read Sci Fi because they wanted to know what it is like to be a robot living in the 103rd Century.

In fact, if you want to know what it's like to be a black transgendered female living in the 21st Century through the medium of SF you can pretty much fuck right off.

Sure, because we all know how hard it is for white straight men to penetrate the minds of blacks gays and women let alone empathize with them....Soooooo much harder then describing the motives, thoughts and dreams of sentient silox crystals.

Rubbish.

You should support Women writing Sci Fi because a large number of monkeys typing on keypads over a sufficient period of time will write your perfect Sci Fi and limiting yourself to only one small subset of monkeys (White straight men) worsens your odds.

Posted by joshua corning on Saturday September 08, 2007 at 12:58 AM

Don't. Whatever you do, don't forget your priorities. Describe the important events of the battle in more detail than you describe the rest of it. Believe it or not, some writers forget to do this, and become distracted by a pretty flower on the battlefield while the enemy critically injures the main character, which they then neglect to describe.

An obvious fan of Moorcock whom has never read any Gene Wolfe.

Posted by joshua corning on Saturday September 08, 2007 at 1:16 AM