I don’t game all the time, though you wouldn’t know it from this blog. I also enjoy reading, dinking around with 3D renders, playing real instruments (gotta keep my pennywhistle skills up should I find an Irish band without one), writing fiction…. Anyway. I planned awhile back to try and branch out to perhaps other interesting things besides MMOs, but I’m not really sure how to go about it.
But what the heck. We all start these blogs because we’re passionate about something, maybe many things, and we want to talk about it, and I want to talk about science fiction. If Abalieno can start talking about fantasy books over on Cesspit, I can talk about SF (and some fantasy too!) here. I’ve added back the categories over on the left there, so if you want to just read the MMO stuff, you can!
Is it surprising that, since I play so many fantasy MMOs, that I don’t actually like fantasy much as a genre? But when I do find an author I like, I devour them. Maybe it’s just as well I find so few to my taste.
For science fiction, though, I’m far more forgiving. I grew up with SF; the old Uxbridge Public Library had bunches. Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Leonard Wibberley, Lloyd Biggle Jr, Gordon Dickson, Kurt Vonnegut, Joanna Russ, Alice “James Tiptree” Sheldon, Barry Longyear, Clifford Simak, Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance… every name I write reminds me of three others I need to put down, but I’ll stop here. And I’ll stop here with the Wikipedia backlinking as well. They are all in there. All very much helped make me the person I am today. Sure, they are mostly writers from the 60s and 70s, but that’s when I was growing up! and that’s what the library had on their shelves!
When I could afford to BUY my own books… I bought James Blish’s Star Trek adaptations. (Blish! That’s ANOTHER one! And Barry Malzberg, he’ll be pissed if he’s not there. Oh yeah, Asimov and Heinlein! Argh, I can’t stop… Henry Kuttner and Kate Wilhelm and Tanith Lee and Anne McCaffrey…)
Anyway. The floodgates open. I’m going to write about SF/Fantasy as it comes up.
One new trend is aspiring fiction authors publishing themselves online, and why not? Toss what you write out into the waters, see how others like it; read that of other people’s and help everyone get better at putting their thoughts and ideas into words. Words, good ones, can last a long time.
So, on to those words.
Mur Lafferty is publishing her ironic superhero novel, “Playing for Keeps”, one chapter every Thursday, on podcast, as a PDF, and with a fan produced meta-podcast, “Third Wave Radio”, where fans can take part in the world – or contribute art or anything else they like. There have been authors publishing chapter-at-a-time fiction on the web well before this, but I’ve never seen an author embrace her community like this… in the end it will be, yes, a novel, but even more – a community that grew up about the writing of a novel.
I think that’s pretty cool. The story is worth listening to/reading as well :)
If you think reading twelve paragraphs of cruft to get to a one paragraph review was bad, wait until I write about Stephen Donaldson’s “Fatal Revenant”…