Poll Results: Do you think SF/F is going to have a good year in 2011?

The results are in (obviously), and they are overwhelmingly optimistic.  Is that a good thing?  I sure hope so.  It's early in the year, but I'd like to think that 2011 will be a year without someone proclaiming the genre dead (or something like that).  We'll see how those thoughts pan out in six months.

Here are the results of the poll:

• 55% said "yes"
• 22.5% said "maybe"
• 22.5% said "no"

The no votes came pretty late in the poll (well after the corresponding post had disappeared from the homepage), so the big question I have for those individuals is this:  why do you think SF/F isn't going to have a good year in 2011?  

I'm defining SF/F beyond its marketing boundaries (the SF/F shelves in your bookstores); for me, then, I see the genre as having a great deal of room to keep pushing outward in very powerful/interesting ways.  I'm hoping we'll see more experimentation in SF/F novels, but I am also cautious about the genres because it's really easy to get burned by hype.  We do have some excellent works of literature coming out, though (or what appear to be excellent works).  We'll wait and see.

Anywho!

A new poll will be up later today, so look out for the post announcement.

New Weird and Scifi Strange: Part Three -- The Existence of Unsure Things

(Read Part One and Part Two)

III.  The Strange is Coming?


When I initially began work on the series of which this is a part, I had always intended to end with a post about Scifi Strange.  I thought I would write a long, definition-based post about Scifi Strange and its problems.  But then it occurred to me that I've technically already done the definition thing elsewhere--i.e., for a conference.  Why rewrite the same basic information if you can simply update the language and add little bits where necessary?  With that in mind, below is an updated version of the Scifi Strange piece of a paper I wrote and presented in the Summer of 2010 (for a conference in England):

Whether Scifi Strange is actually a new movement or subgenre is probably not apparent at the

Video Found: Kevin Bacon Plays Himself (Tremors References Abound)

My good friend Loopdilou (who I do the Skiffy and Fanty Show with) pointed me to this amusing video of Kevin Bacon playing an obsessed Kevin Bacon fan (who is advertising for the Logitech Revue).  What follows is a brilliant and unusual meta-something.

Here it is (after the fold):

Movie Review: Tron: Legacy (Strange Horizons)

In case you missed it, the fine folks at Strange Horizons have published my review of Tron: Legacy.  The review is focused on the worldbuilding, rather than the general quality of the film.  Hopefully you all find it interesting.  Do leave a comment there!

You also might want to see my brief, general review of Tron: Legacy here (where I put my score of the film, which isn't in my review at Strange Horizons).

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go jump up and down with excitement for an hour.

P.S.:  I don't suspect you could have missed my review, since it went up today.  But it's fun to say "in case you missed it."

All Your Literature Are Belong to Us: Interpretation/Reception and Ownership

I've become interested in the last few months with the idea of intellectual ownership of written materials.  In part this is because of the ways some fiction authors (and others) have responded to criticism and interpretation in the last few years elsewhere and on this blog.  Setting aside instances where someone intentionally spams a book's page with negative reviews, it seems to me that for some authors there is a critical disconnect between the act of creation and the life as the creator.  That is that these individuals believe they have ownership over interpretation after the moment it leaves their hands and becomes a publicly accessible (purchasable) object.  As a writer, I can understand the impulse to want to avoid negative criticism and even to say "I am not X," but responding to criticism or interpretations is not usually a skill writers have learned how to do (or that they can learn how to do without stepping on toes).  They become "problems."

I think it's important for fiction authors--published or otherwise--to understand that they don't

The Skiffy and Fanty Show 2.2a is Up! (The Beauty of SF and Her Sisters, Part One)

This week's episode features part one of a pretty intense genre discussion. We talk about what we think makes science fiction beautiful and how it relates to other genres. You can check out the episode here, or look us up on iTunes.

Thanks for listening!

Adventures in Real-Time Story Collaboration: Day Two (Plot Problems)

Adam and I have made enormous progress on our collaborative story.  How much?  Day one ended at about 850 words, which is certainly nothing to scoff at; day two, however, ended at about 4,000 words, which seems to me to be an impressive amount of writing for anyone.  To be fair, I wrote close to 2,500 of that, since Adam skipped out for 45 minutes to take care of some business.  That means it's his turn to add a substantial chunk to the story though.

In any case, some very interesting problems arose as we started work on the project again.  Plotting, for example, proved difficult for both of us, since we couldn't decide where to take the