Category Archives: scifi
Why Do Thrillers Outsell Science Fiction?
I’ve written before about the relationship between spy fiction and science fiction, but after recently re-reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, the relationship is even further solidified in my mind. While Fleming and Le Carré provide good examples … Continue reading
Accessibility: Speculative Fiction’s Pernicious Strawman
NOTE: My thinking here is a bit of a tangential response to some of John H. Stevens’ recent Erudite Ogre columns over at SF Signal. I strongly recommend those columns as an insightful exploration of genre and genre identity. Here’s … Continue reading
REVIEW: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod
Title: The Night Sessions Author: Ken MacLeod Pub Date: April 3rd, 2012 (US reprint) August 7th, 2008 (UK original) Chris’ Rating (5 possible): An Attempt at Categorization If You Like… / You Might Like… The Dervish House River of Gods … Continue reading
Railing against Consensus Taste: Why We Complain about Literary Awards
Awards season is in full swing: we’ve got the Hugos, the Nebulas, the BSFAs, the Aurealis, the Bram Stokers. It seems that every week a different shortlist gets announced or a different grand prize is given out. And this year, … Continue reading
Post-scarcity and Realistic Utopia: Where’s the fight?
One of the WIPs I’m working on right now is a far future SF novel inspired largely by Le Guin’s classic The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. As I’ve observed before, utopian novels are hard to pull off because an ostensibly … Continue reading
REVIEW: Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Title: Planesrunner Author: Ian McDonald Pub Date: December 6th, 2011 Chris’ Rating (5 possible): An Attempt at Categorization If You Like… / You Might Like… The Dervish House Use of Weapons City of Golden Shadow Neuromancer A Wrinkle in Time … Continue reading
Earning/Maintaining a Reader’s Trust: Character/Narrator Consistency and Reliability (part 3 of 3)
NOTE: This is the third and final installment in a three-part series on earning and maintaining a reader’s trust. The first part focuses on earning initial trust just at the start of a story, while the second part focuses on … Continue reading
Science Fiction Techniques in Spy Novels: James Bond and George Smiley
One of the upsides of spending two weeks traveling on business in Eastern Europe is that it really adds some perspective to spy fiction. For years I’ve meant to read more of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and to pick … Continue reading
INTERVIEW: Jonathan Case and Steven Padnick
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Dear Creature by Jonathan Case, a new graphic novel out from Tor Books. As the review probably made clear, I love this book – both as a story, and … Continue reading
