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Yesterday, we asked a bunch of our favorite alternate history authors to list the biggest mistakes that they see other writers making in creating new historical timelines. One author who didn't get back to us by our deadline was Jo Walton, author of Farthing and several other great books. We just heard from her, and she raised an excellent point that nobody else had brought up yet: More »
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There are the books you want to give all your friends, and there are the books you wish you could go back and give your younger self. And then there's the rare book, like Jo Walton's Among Others, that's both. More »
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Science fiction's greatest authors have brilliant ideas, storytelling mojo... and plenty of stubbornness. Many of the field's greatest writers were buried in rejection slips, before they finally broke in. Here are 15 classic novels that publishers didn't want to touch. More »
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Which books do you buy extra copies of on sight, especially if they're used — knowing you'll want to give them to someone else soon? Jo Walton has sparked a great discussion of book hoarding and giving over at Tor.com. More »
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Looking for an alternative to the horrific scenarios of 2012 and The Road? Try the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the Guardian suggests: Stories like Day Of The Triffids and The World In Winter feature a less violent version of the end. More »
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When science fiction books depict people living in the distant future, where's the coffee? Tor.Com's Jo Walton wants to know. She lists some of the hilarious words authors use instead of coffee, including Anne McCaffrey's "klah" and Steven Brust's "klava." More »
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The future is over! It's no longer possible to write about the future, because the Singularity will definitely happen in twenty years. We'll have artificial intelligence, and the meaning of humanity will be transformed. Is this idea hindering science fiction? More »
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Everybody thinks that Pride And Prejudice And Zombies is a nifty new mash-up invention. But the the original monster mash-up book was Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw, a 19th century novel of manners, with dragon protagonists. More »
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People are still trying to wrap their minds around the idea of the singularity, as a rather random article in the New York Times yesterday made clear. Meanwhile, Tor's Jo Walton and Rudy "Post-Singular" Rucker have moved way beyond the singularity onto the next big idea. Walton wrote about how she was sick of SF writers feeling constrained by the idea that the future will contain a "singularity" where sci/tech becomes so advanced that nothing in the world would make sense to us present-day types anymore. Rucker responded by offering nine ideas for scifi creators that have nothing to do with the singularity. More »
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Farthing and Tooth And Claw author Jo Walton is widely regarded as one of the best writers of fantasy right now, and she won the John W. Campbell award for the best new writer of speculative fiction. So why does she feel she can't write science fiction? Because, she explains on her journal, she knows too much science to write utter nonsense, and not enough science to get SF stories absolutely right. It makes me wonder if science fiction is scaring away some of its best potential writers. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5016989&view=rss&microfeed=true Sci-fi author Jo Walton writes about the value, from her point of view, of science fiction: "SF lets you talk about the human condition more widely and from different angles by contrasting it with the alien condition and the AI condition and the android condition . . . In SF, you get books like Spin and Cyteen where new and interesting problems (aliens speeding up the rotation of the Earth, cloning and life extension tech) ask new and interesting questions about the human condition. Most of the things mainstream books have to say . . . have been said before, and even encountered before in real life. They have limited options to examine." Um, yeah. Too bad William Faulkner didn't know about cloning and life-extension tech. Maybe Quentin could have lived a little longer. More here. More »
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