So, I’ve been planning all year to go to Readercon, my favorite regional con, and now at the last minute, I find out I can’t go. I don’t want to get into the reasons here on my blog, but I will say I’m quite disappointed.
Mood: Bummed
I just posted about slushy slush I found recently, but other than that I know there hasn’t been much activity here lately. Sorry about that. Between being a bit burnt out after Slush Writer Appreciation Month and being swamped with three deadlines this week and having Readercon this weekend, I’ve been quite busy lately. I’ll probably be back in action next week some time with new and insightful commentary, and perhaps a Readercon report.
Oh, and lest you all start questioning my taste, some of the books I’ve been reading lately have been for review purposes, so that’s why I’m reading them, rather than purely for enjoyment.
In the slush pile, I recently stumbled across a submission from a vanity press author who I’d seen self-promoting himself on various message boards.
The author managed to break just about every rule of submission etiquette.
Here’s a partial list of his crimes against me:
(1) a large ms. arrived folded into thirds inside a #10 envelope
(2) single spaced
(3) extra small font (looked like 10 or 8 point Times New Roman)
(4) submitted two stories at the same time
(5) failed to include an SASE
(6) the mss. were stapled
Oh yeah, and the story itself was pretty bad. Well, dreadful really. And I could go on, but why prolong the agony?
Say Happy Birthday to my dawg, Charlie Finlay. And to wish him a happy birthday, why don’t you drop by his new blog and tell him how great it is?
UPDATE: Or, better yet: go buy his book, and tell him how great that is. Because it is, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my friend.
Here is a complete list of all the Slush Writer Appreciation Month interviews:
Interview
with Brian Bieniowski
Slush Reader, Asimov’s Science Fiction
Interview
with Douglas Cohen
Slush Reader, Realms of Fantasy
Interview
with Kelly Link
Slush Reader, SCI FICTION
Interview
with Aaron A. Reed
Author of “Shutdown/Retrovival,”
F&SF, March 2003
Interview
with Kate Mason
Author of “The Millstone,”
F&SF, April 2004
Interview
with Jaye Lawrence
Author of “Kissing Frogs,”
F&SF, May 2004
Interview
with George Tucker
Author of “Welcome to Justice 2.0,”
F&SF, January 2004
Interview
with Jeremy Minton
Author of “Halfway House,”
F&SF, January 2003
Interview
with Ef Deal
Author of “Czesko,”
F&SF, Forthcoming
Interview with Mike Shultz
Author of “Old as Books,”
F&SF, July 2005
If you’re a publisher, or publicist, or author, and you’d like me to consider your book for review, I’d be happy to do so. If I read the book and I like it, I might talk about it on my blog. I might even write a review of it and get it published elsewhere AND talk about it on my blog. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
For examples of my blog-reviews, click here.
Since I’m not about to post my home address on the Internet where crazy and vengeful slush writers can see it, material to be considered for review may be sent to:
John Joseph Adams, c/o Fantasy & Science Fiction, P.O. Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030
Or, you can email me, which you’d probably want to do first anyway, and I’ll probably give you my home address via email.
Publisher’s Description:
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his
back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once,
then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best
friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout.
It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk–a heat source,
rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only
have the world’s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered
remains are pitted and aged, as though they’d been in space far longer than
their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a
bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts.
Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside–more than a hundred
million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are
only about forty years in our future.
Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this
slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister
cult leader who’s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.
Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work,
turning the planet green. Next they send humans…and immediately get back an
emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars.
Then Earth’s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars.
Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will
scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun–and report back on what they
find.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
Review:
Spin is a superb novel full of Big Ideas, but
those Big Ideas don’t come at the expense of rich character development as
is so often the case with books of this sort. Wilson
has a real knack for creating characters one can empathize with and can
really grow to care about. The famil
y
relationship depicted here, between the narrator,
Tyler Dupree, and his childhood friends Jason (the genius) and Diane (his
first, unrequited love), is the real driving force of this novel, and is
what makes it such a compelling page-turner. The prose is clean and
fluid, and Wilson expertly paces the book, keeping the reader engaged and
anxious to find out what comes next. This can be tricky in a novel
that spans several subjective years (and billions of relativistic years),
but Wilson pulls it off marvelously.
Spin is exactly the sort of novel that I think we
need to see more of, one that infuses the reader with that gosh-wow sense of
wonder that many writers seem to have forgotten is the reason we all fell in
love with the genre in the first place.
So, who’s going to Readercon? Sound off on the message board.
Spielberg:
“Science fiction for me is a vacation, a vacation away from all the rules of narrative logic, a vacation away from physics and physical science.
“It just let’s you leave all the rules behind and just kind of fly.”
from Reuters.com
According to Tim Pratt: “Steph Burgis was asking writers to post lists of fun things they like to put in books, over in her comments section.”
I’m an editor, not a writer, but if I did write something, I would probably include some of the following things. Might be interesting to the slush writers reading this since I’m probably predisposed toward liking stories with the following SF elements:
1. Skyhooks
2. Dinosaurs
3. Post-apocalyptic wastelands
4. Supersmart animals (intelligence-boosted/evolved/uplifted chimps, gorillas, kangaroos, dogs, mice, etc.)
5. Near future explorations of our solar system
Tim went on to make a list of things he doesn’t like in books and will likely never use. I won’t go so far as to say I actively dislike all of these, but to me they’re in danger of becoming played out, as I’ve seen a glut of stories and/or novels dealing with them lately. In fact, I can think of recent examples of nearly all of these that I did quite enjoy. But like I said, they’re all in real danger of becoming completely played out. Anyway, here’s the bad list:
1. Immortality via computerized consciousness transfer
2. Artificial life forms turning on their creators
3. Elves (from authors not named Tolkien)
4. Unicorns (from authors not named Beagle)
5. Undead/afterlife/ghost stories