No one has said it better:
“So I think I know why Holdstock moved from science fiction into fantasy: because he found a perfect science fictional idea that could be most satisfactorily explored through the medium of fantasy.”
This and much more of importance to be read in this blog post by Paul Kinkaid.
According to Ansible, Robert Holdstock is going through a rough patch, hospitalized with an E. Coli infection.
Robert Holdstock was here in Portugal a few years ago. I met him with a bunch of other people, none of us having read a single word by him. He was kind with all of us, a great conversation ensued, where we got to know, for instance, that the minute he arrived at Lisbon’s Airport, on listening to portuguese talking near him, he had a flash of wrongness (“maybe I’m in the wrong place: everyone seems to be speaking russian or some east european language!”). It was an afternoon well spent and it all got me very interested in reading his work. The Mythago Wood series is a marvelous take on fantasy that successfully runs away from the Tolkien tropes and modes, brilliantly written, which has come to be an important part of my personal readings.
I hope he gets better.
This looks very interesting. Edited by Geoff Rymann, with pieces from Justina Robson, Adam Roberts, Gwyneth Jones, Paul Cornell and others.
Click on the cover for the blurbs.
Me, I already bought it.
This is a concept that has been around in Comics and theater shows but has never been rendered this way, at least as far as I know.
Very good cinematic and storytelling potential in it.
It seems that now you have an excuse if you are or turn into a road-rager:
Gasoline fumes.
It explains a lot. Really. But then there’s that consciousness thingy, the one that sets us off from lab rats and animals in general.
It’s not a simple question of course, but is good to know that, when you get the urge to be an ass-hole in traffic, it may have something to do with an oil-derivative.
Or maybe not. There' are lots of situations where you may have this sort of attitude. Blogging, for instance, is well under this category; how many times do you comment or post in violent reaction to what someone says, how many times does it look to you as a bit out of proportion?
Character flaw or toxic fumes? Well, you decide. Me , I’ll go simmer down with a good book.
This is especially useful to young writers, an excerpt from a post by Frederick Pohl at his wonderful blog, where he talks about another iconic genre figure, Lester Del Rey:
“Lester had a whole other style. Lester took as his model some of the historically great editors of the past and, like them, questioned every phrase and comma in every manuscript he accepted and made the authors rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. It paid off — once when I was having lunch with Lester’s boss he told me that he believed Lester was the most profitable editor in the publishing industry — but it was arduous.”
So, the next time you find the urge to wriggle yourself out of editorial hints to your work, think again: it will probably make your work better.
By the way, just take a stroll through Fred’s blog – it is full of great insights and pieces on the history of SF. It is apropriately entitled “The Way the Future Blogs”.
Surfing and finding interesting stuff. What more can a creative mind want? Well, now that I think of it… quite a lot really. Meanwhile, click the picture for an interesting free webcomic called The Abominable Charles Christopher, by Karl Kerschl.
.jpg)
