"Tooth And Claw" Proves That Dragons Trump Zombies

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 »

Rudy Rucker Gives You Nine Ideas for Scifi that Breaks the Rules

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 »

How Much Science Do You Need To Know To Write Science Fiction?

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 »

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.