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Whiskey and Warfare
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Whiskey and Warfare: The Team Huntress Flights “Old Woman’s War” is how I characterized Whiskey and Warfare by E.M. Hamill when someone asked me what I was reading for SPSFC4. While I found John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War sort of meh, this book feels like a more mature, more heartfelt exploration of similar ground.…
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EAT
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EAT: ΣΔΤ Book One: Sigma “Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the…
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THE REALISTS OF A LARGER REALITY
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Is there a science fiction author more akin to literature than Ursula K. Le Guin? I can’t think of any. There are others that may rise to her level. Octavia E. Butler, certainly. One day, I think N.K. Jemisin will have that luster. I struggle to think of a male writer with the same…
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CORDWAINER SMITH – THE SCI-FI MASTER YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF
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When I was a teenager, my brother introduced me to a set of books by a writer with a goofy name, Cordwainer Smith. The first was a short story collection called The Instrumentality of Mankind, and the other was a novel called Norstrilia. My mind was blown. These stories, published in the 50s and…
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THE CASE FOR ASTROLOGY
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But, that has nothing to do with Astrology, I hear the rational people shouting. And I have to disagree. Astrology is just a calendar. What stars are visible between December 22nd and January 19th determine my sign. In modern times we call them months — but it’s the same thing. Rational people will tell…
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MACHINE LEARNING
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I started drawing when I was 3. Writing started later, but my earliest surviving stories were from age 6. Photography started in sophomore year in high school when my father and I built a darkroom in our basement, and my mother bought me a cheap Russian SLR. Code didn’t enter the scene until I…
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VONNEGUT ON WRITING SHORT STORIES
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There was a time when I was a wee lad and Kurt Vonnegut was not particularly famous, when you could make a decent living selling short stories to magazines. There were lots of magazines and lots of readers. There was no internet and people doomscrolled their newspaper in one sitting at breakfast. There were…