A Micro-Triplet to Usher in 2013
To increase my already wild popularity, I penned two bookend articles that gore sacred oxen. A contribution to a Mind Meld at SF Signal about “Books we were told we’d love but didn’t” appeared two days ago. “Invisible Ink”, a response to Mike Brotherton’s olden mouldies (aka whiteanglomen) “hard” SF list, just appeared in SFWA.
Also, the republication of “Planetfall” at the World SF site caught the eye of Nowa Fantastyka, a prominent, long-lived Polish SF/F magazine. They want to republish the story in Polish. This would be the second translation of my work — To Seek Out New Life came out in Japanese — but the first one of my fiction.
Exciting stuff, Athena!! (-:
Speaking of books that we were told we’d love and did not, I’ve run across quite a few of those. A lot of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein falls into this category due to clunky writing and fairly leadened opinions. I’ve learned that if I can’t get through a book, I should just put it down- it is the author’s responsibility to keep me interested, not my responsibility to “read the classics”.
I’ve noticed that many areas of science, particularly biology and the “soft” sciences like anthropology and sociology, are sidelined in so called “hard” SF, and the vaunted physics and astronomy is frequently subject to vast distortions. Also, any human concerns are utterly lost in the writers devotion to the BIG IDEAS, leaving the writing flat and boring.
I didn’t mention the mouldy trinity in the SF Signal article because that goes without saying (also, the wrinkle there was “books you expected/were told you’d like” — people know better than to recommend these three to me). And you’re right about putting a book down if you really don’t like it: life is finite, and at some point we know what we like. “Hard” SF is a total misnomer, IMO.
Courtship Rite was written by Donald Kingsbury.
It was, and I’ve asked the SFWA webmaster to correct it.