I don’t game all the time, though you wouldn’t know it from this blog. I also enjoy reading, dinking around with 3D renders, playing real instruments (gotta keep my pennywhistle skills up should I find an Irish band without one), writing fiction…. Anyway. I planned awhile back to try and branch out to perhaps other interesting things besides MMOs, but I’m not really sure how to go about it.
But what the heck. We all start these blogs because we’re passionate about something, maybe many things, and we want to talk about it, and I want to talk about science fiction. If Abalieno can start talking about fantasy books over on Cesspit, I can talk about SF (and some fantasy too!) here. I’ve added back the categories over on the left there, so if you want to just read the MMO stuff, you can!
Is it surprising that, since I play so many fantasy MMOs, that I don’t actually like fantasy much as a genre? But when I do find an author I like, I devour them. Maybe it’s just as well I find so few to my taste.
For science fiction, though, I’m far more forgiving. I grew up with SF; the old Uxbridge Public Library had bunches. Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Leonard Wibberley, Lloyd Biggle Jr, Gordon Dickson, Kurt Vonnegut, Joanna Russ, Alice “James Tiptree” Sheldon, Barry Longyear, Clifford Simak, Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance… every name I write reminds me of three others I need to put down, but I’ll stop here. And I’ll stop here with the Wikipedia backlinking as well. They are all in there. All very much helped make me the person I am today. Sure, they are mostly writers from the 60s and 70s, but that’s when I was growing up! and that’s what the library had on their shelves!
When I could afford to BUY my own books… I bought James Blish’s Star Trek adaptations. (Blish! That’s ANOTHER one! And Barry Malzberg, he’ll be *pissed* if he’s not there. Oh yeah, Asimov and Heinlein! Argh, I can’t stop… Henry Kuttner and Kate Wilhelm and Tanith Lee and Anne McCaffrey…)
Anyway. The floodgates open. I’m going to write about SF/Fantasy as it comes up.
One new trend is aspiring fiction authors publishing themselves online, and why not? Toss what you write out into the waters, see how others like it; read that of other people’s and help everyone get better at putting their thoughts and ideas into words. Words, good ones, can last a long time.
So, on to those words.
Mur Lafferty is publishing her ironic superhero novel, “Playing for Keeps“, one chapter every Thursday, on podcast, as a PDF, and with a fan produced meta-podcast, “Third Wave Radio”, where fans can take part in the world — or contribute art or anything else they like. There have been authors publishing chapter-at-a-time fiction on the web well before this, but I’ve never seen an author embrace her community like this… in the end it will be, yes, a novel, but even more — a community that grew up about the writing of a novel.
I think that’s pretty cool. The story is worth listening to/reading as well 🙂
If you think reading twelve paragraphs of cruft to get to a one paragraph review was bad, wait until I write about Stephen Donaldson’s “Fatal Revenant”…
8 thoughts on “SF: Playing for Keeps”
Comments are closed.
Tipa you may blog about any subject you like – its kind of a rule of blogging isn’t it? Can’t claim to be as well read in in SF as yourself, probably read more fantasy but I do have a weakness for really imaginative SF. V. Vinges Fire upon the deep blew me away as does almost everything by P. Hamilton. I also love anything that Ian (M) Banks writes even though every one of his books has a decidedly nasty streak – not sure if I would like to meet the man himself. Dan Simmons Hyperion sequence is also top notch stuff. I am currently working my way through K. Anderssons “Seven Suns” saga – more space opera than real Sci Fi and frowned upon by many hardline SFers but a rollicking good read all the same imho.
Just curious about “the old Uxbridge Public Library”, that isn’t Uxbridge, Middlesex in the UK is it? I only ask as when I went to Brunel University way back when I devoured their excellent SF and Fantasy section and it just seems to be too much of a coincidence that there could be another!
@mbp — You and I share tastes — I love Iain Banks and even Iain M. Banks 🙂 His “The Bridge” is one of my all time favorite novels, and I re-read “Use of Weapons” whenever I’m feeling too good about people. When I first read “Hyperion”, it struck me deeply… Now, if by K. Anderson you mean Kevin Anderson, I dunno… I’ve read a few of his books — I stated reading him before he became a media tie-in mogul and a player in other people’s worlds, and his stuff was okay, but I don’t like what he did to “Dune”.
@Lessling — bizarrely, it *is* a coincidence. I grew up in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, USA. Here in New England, if you just look at the city names, you’d think you were in Britain — I live in a town called Manchester now 😛 And Greenwich and Norwich are close by. Our Uxbridge Public Library looked like a miniature castle, complete with tower. Wow, I didn’t expect to find it in Wikipedia.
Its funny Tipa – I got exactly the same reaction from other Sci Fi fans when I recommended Kevin Anderson. He really seems to have pissed a lot of people off by writing pot boilers to order. I’m lucky I guess that I never read any of his Dune or Star Wars tie ins. All I can say is that I am really enjoying Seven Suns saga. It could be that those other works were just commercial cash ins ( he does seem to be able to write books to ver quickly to orde) while Seven Suns is his own baby. If I were to compare it to anything I would say its a bit like George R.R, Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire set in space. If you haven’t read Martin by the way you should. He is the cream of the crop of fantasy writers at the moment.
Re: Ian Banks – I love his stuff (started on The Bridge and Wasp Factory before discovering his Sci Fi) but he really has a most twisted mind. I still have nightmares about a particular scene (cant remember which book – possibly Phloebas) where a cannibal king had a special set of teeth fitted to allow him to strip the flesh off the finger bones of live victims. Urghh…. I feel sick just writing about it.
I met Kevin Anderson, way back when — either at Baycon or Silicon, both regional SF conventions in the San Jose, CA area. He was just some ordinary guy, working up in Silicon Valley, and he wrote some very fannish books — he had a series where some people were drawn from the real world into a fantasy game they played (a very common theme), but it had some nice bits — and then he started writing media tie-ins and shared worlds and then he was a huge writer. Every fan’s dream? He’s living it! And I know that professional writers still have to put food on the table and find places to live, but even given all that… I just never got the excitement and presence to his Dune books that Frank Herbert gave. I’m just glad Herbert’s “Dosadi Experiment” and “Destination: Void” universes weren’t popular enough to receive the same treatment, though the “D:V” books did become a little self-indulgent toward the end.
I have been reading Alastair Reynolds’ series which I am really enjoying. Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, and am halfway through the last one Absolution Gap. He is an astrophysics professor so he does a good job with the science. Though the last book is kind of .. wierd. I don’t know if the 3rd is really science fiction or not.
But the first ones are really great, about the search for alien life, it also doesn’t have any faster than light travel (but near-light travel instead), which has an interesting effect on timelines and lifespans.
@yunk — I’ve read some Alastair Reynolds, though without my books at hand, I can’t remember which. I remember I liked the books a lot and will have to look up the Revelation books (I might even have read them! I better check to be sure!).
@mbp — oh, George R. R. Martin. I’ve liked him a long, long, long time. He’s been a well-known and sometimes disturbing presence in my SF life for decades. “Dying of the Light” is another of my all-time favorite books. I can’t describe how it makes me feel. Re: The “Song” series — I have the books, but my recently failing eyesight made it impossible to finish the last one, so I’m putting it off until I get a Sony Reader and buy the eBook version. His imagination has always been extraordinarily vivid, but he has a funny side. If you can find his collection “Tuf Voyaging” in a used bookstore somewhere, get it 🙂
Sorry to hear about your sight problems Tipa. Hope this has nothing to do with long hours peering at a monitor. Thank you for the pointers to earlier Martin stuff. I will look out for it. It might be just the thing to keep me entertained while I wait for the next episode of Ice and Fire.