September 2011
29 posts
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Cory Doctorow on Self-Publishing, Jesse Ball on...
Cory Doctorow, author, blogger, and co-editor of the wildly popular pop culture website BoingBoing, is also a columnist for the science fiction magazine Locus. In his most recent article, Why Should Anyone Care?, he gives thought to his self-published short story collection With a Little Help that came out in December of 2010.
Over the past two years there’s been a steady increase in both...
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Old Man's War / John Scalzi
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
Visiting Kathy’s grave was the less dramatic of the two. She’s buried in Harris Creek Cemetery, not more than a mile down the road from where I live and where we raised our family. Getting her into the cemetery was more difficult than perhaps it should have been; neither of us...
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“He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive...”
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas...
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet...
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz / L. Frank Baum
She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened; and Toto put his cold little nose into her face and whined dismally. Dorothy sat up and noticed that the house was not moving; nor was it dark, for the bright sunshine came in at the window,...
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Zero History / William Gibson
Inchmale haled a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city.
Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstrey a shade of orthopedic fawn.
“Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping...
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The Time Machine / H.G. Wells
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and...
August 2011
7 posts
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The Call of Cthulhu / H.P. Lovecraft
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern...
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“The gift I had bargained for had turned out to be a thumping headache and a...”
– Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon
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July 2011
16 posts
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On Bestseller Lists
“Think outside the list” — Michael Dirda, book critic
read more: On the Shelf: What’s a Bestseller?, Ed Champion Recommends, and Short Stories for a Busy Life
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