Damien G. Walter

At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have [...]

  Paulo Coelho, in amongst his thoughts on the insanity of SOPA, shares the idea that all writers are only recycling four stories. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. I [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to direct your attention to the shortlist for the Kitschies, the annual awards organised by the folks at the Pornokitsch blog, which is quickly establishing itself as one of the two or three most relevant awards in fantastic literature. And the nominated novels are: The Enterprise of Death by Jesse [...]

Science Fiction is often called a “literature of ideas”. Maybe it is better understood as a literature of change. Listen to the Guardian books podcast: Science Fiction now and tomorrow. Today’s Guardian books podcast, which I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in alongside Lauren Beukes, Alaistar Reynolds, Jeff Noon and Michael [...]

This evening I bought Jeffrey Eugenides ‘The Marriage Plot’ from the Amazon Kindle store. I would love to say that I always buy books when it would be just as easy to download a pirate version for free, but I would be being  dishonest. But buying the book has recently become a far more likely [...]

This potent rite-of-passage tale offers readers some useful pointers on keeping the heart warm in allegorically wintry times. The novel that raised Haruki Murakami to literary superstardom ranges across the seasons, but the heart of its meaning is found in winter. When 30-something Toru Watanabe hears a fragment of the titular Beatles track after a long airplane [...]

After enough years in fandom there are certain arguments you learn to steer clear of because they are futile and never end. Genre definitions are one of them and I really should know better by now, however… The pugnacious @gavreads earlier tweeted the following definitions, distilled from this IO9 report on a talk between Margaret Atwood [...]

Look, I don’t mean to give you a big head here, but if you’re reading this then you’re probably a pretty smart cookie. Statistical research suggests that people who stop by this way tend to be avid readers, and probably writers as well. Clever clogs like us get used to each others company, and it’s [...]

Things have been happening and I have been remiss in linking to them here. My Weird Things column in The Guardian continues with thoughts on Todd Grimson, author of Stainless and possibly one of our greatest and most neglected horror writers. At the SF Signal blog we discuss mainstream authors stepping across to genre fiction. [...]

I think of science fiction, including my own, as very much a paraliterary genre. The fact that it lives – and has lived – on the margin is important to its history. If you remove it from that margin, you remove it from its historical context; I don’t think that’s such a good thing. Genre boundaries [...]