- Comic Book Artists Illustrate Sci-Fi Legends [via]
- The Unicorn Will Not Save Publishing [via]
- Teens Who Feel More Peer Pressure Turn Out Better, Not Worse [via]
- Why I Am Not Afraid to Take Your Money by Amanda Fucking Palmer. This is a little old, and has been reposted and discussed at some length, but it’s still sitting in my saved links. (As is Caitlin R. Kiernan’s response.) I think it’s a discussion still worth having. As Harlan Ellison would say (in his inimitable way), pay the writer.
- And finally, Maria Bamford‘s Christmas Special [via]:
Maria Bamford’s Christmas Special! from Punchline Magazine on Vimeo.
sci-fi
Friday Night Video
“Built a Time Machine to Kill Hitler”:
Via SF Signal.
Wednesday various
- Mark Evanier on screeners:
If I send a screenplay to most of these studios, they’ll return it unread with a stern letter — probably written by the guy who writes the threats in the screeners — that they don’t accept unsolicited material. And then they send me unsolicited material…including copies of their screenplays.
- Do you really want those two front teeth for Christmas? Something tells me “a knuckle ring fitted with four of your molars” is just waiting to turn up on a C.S.I.-type show.
- A further lesson in how not to respond to a bad review.
- Well that’s surprising: Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher are closing. [via]
- And finally, Warren Ellis is right: Slingers looks like very, very intriguing.
Science fiction vs. fantasy
Ask any writer or fan to define science fiction (or fantasy) — and lord knows, people have asked — you’ll get a lot of contradictory and only sometimes helpful answers. Here are just some that have been sitting around in my saved links for awhile:
“Science fiction writers don’t admit magic, they don’t admit UFOs even, but they accept as given these two magical properties [time travel and travel that exceeds the speed of light, so that, in a sense, even their science fiction is built on fantasy.” Robert J. Sawyer
“Magic gets to break the laws of nature. Science doesn’t. And that goes for science-fiction, too: It might do things that aren’t currently possible, but as soon as it starts breaking the laws of physics it has stepped out of science and into fantasy.” – Mary Robinette Kowal
“The failure mode of science fiction is NOT ‘fantasy,’ it is ‘bad science fiction.'” – John Scalzi
“…the term ‘science fiction’ is a misnomer, that trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of it leads only to bloody knuckles; that better labels have been devised (Heinlein’s suggestion, ‘speculative fiction,’ is the best, I think), but that we’re stuck with this one; and that it will do us no particular harm if we remember that, like ‘The Saturday Evening Post,’ it means what we point to when we say it.” – Damon Knight
“What can not be defined are genres. You can’t define poetry, the novel, tragedy, pornography, comics… and you cannot define academic criticism either. Now, you can describe all of them in perfectly useful ways. You can describe them so people can recognize them. So that particular provisional job that you have to do can get done. You just can not specify their necessary and sufficient conditions. So there are no root examples, no borderline cases. With different descriptions, different borderlines come into being. I think the genre or at least genre criticism, might take a major step forward if it simply threw out the term ‘definition.’ The term ‘description,’ would do perfectly well. The point is, if someone asks you, ‘How would you “describe” science fiction,’ the proper answer is: ‘For what particular purpose do you want this description?’ This is not the mood in which the question ‘How do you define sf?’ gets asked.” – Samuel R. Delaney
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Meanwhile, Gerry Canavan is co-editing a Special Issue on SF, Fantasy, and Myth for Duke University Press, at least partly on where these definitions overlap and/or contradict one another.
As I’ve noted before, I usually find strict definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or any genre) pretty limiting. I think I most like what Delaney says above.
Monday various
- “TIGA, the computer games industry body, is facilitating links between publishers and computer games developers by inviting its members to create briefs for live publishing-based projects. That’s right. No more video games based on popular movies based on popular books; these folks are going direct to the source. Which naturally begs the question: which books would you like to see made into video games? [via]
- Speaking of games, here’s two: Small Worlds and Quizapedia. [via]
- Let Them Sing it for You: does exactly what it says on the tin. Amusing, though your mileage may vary. [via]
- An interesting exchange between stand-up comedian Paul F. Tompkins and Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd. I’m not really sure which one of them I side with here. [via]
- And finally, SCI FI Wire cancels its columns. I can’t say I’m at all surprised. Its steady race to be a weak clone of io9 (which isn’t always so terrific itself) continues.