Writing can be a cruel game. Not least for those who, to innocent bystanders, might seem like winners in the game of literary life. Take Christopher Priest for instance. With a long and esteemed career in writing, numerous accolades under his belt and a Hollywood adaptation of his novel The Prestige still within living memory, [...]
Science fiction and fantasy may not seem like natural targets of literary criticism. The last thing anyone wants while trying to escape into a fantasy world is some clever clogs popping up to tell you the novel you’re reading is a reactionary construct perpetuating an outmoded value system in the face of a post-industrial reality. [...]
I’m quite chuffed to say that my story Star has been accepted by new UK based Universe magazine and will appear in their first ‘Albion’ themed issue in May 2012. Star was written in the 5th week of my time at the Clarion writer’s workshop in 2008. I went to Clarion with the mission of breaking [...]
Many people say writing can’t be taught. But it can certainly be learnt. (I actually think it can be taught as well, or I would not teach it.) When we’re young and full of beans we like to think we know it all. It’s hard to admit to yourself you don’t how to do something. [...]
Fellow seekers, I need your help as I seek the grail of great, original and independently-published fiction in ebooks and on the web. People have been telling weird stories for as long as we’ve been huddling around fires attempting to keep the dark at bay. Our earliest stories overflow with the weird. The Babylonian Epic [...]
As my winter hibernation comes to end I’m stumbling like an angry bear from my cave for a few events over the next few weeks. (Actually I’m quite a chirpy bear currently, so no fear for any of the events organisers involved!) Saturday 10th March : I am the Science Fiction Book Doctor at Derby [...]
My friend Amy Sundberg talks about the Writing Mind, in response to Jeff VanderMeer’s missive that forcing your concentration to meet a fixed daily word count isn’t a universally good idea. Even when you aren’t writing, you can still be writing. The imagination is always busy, and sometimes it does its best work when we [...]
People used to accuse artists who took the corporate dollar of ‘selling out’. It’s a phrase that seems to have fallen from fashion, perhaps because art has become so aligned with entertainment in the popular imagination that it’s hard for people to see what ’selling out’ out even means any more. Why would you criticise [...]
From Merlin to Harry Potter, English magic has a long tradition. But what does it say about today’s culture? English occultist, bohemian and author Aleister Crowley defined magick as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”. Crowley’s will was aided by the inheritance age 11 of a tidy fortune, [...]
A Google HUD journalist auctions the eternal copyright to her feed for a Quora credit fortune but is replaced by a narrative AI generated from her lifetime experience. Rules of Micro SF: Tell a story in one sentence. It can be any length but must work grammatically and be reasonably well parsed by a reader. Include at least two [...]
