Category: Uncategorized
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Clash of the Myopias
So The Road has won the Pulitzer Prize. Congrats to Cormac McCarthy. And now, cue two parallel processes: literary critics will break the spines of their thesauri, and their sentences, trying to describe the book without using the phrase “science fiction” — and science fiction fandom will spontaneously combust from a combination of anger that…
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‘God Damn It, You’ve Got to Be Kind’
Kurt Vonnegut is dead. And because one of the things we do when people die is remember our interactions with them, I’ll offer this brief story of failure of nerve. In 1995, or maybe early ’96, Vonnegut came all the way to Orono to give a speech at the Maine Center for the Arts. Afterward,…
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The Greatest Movie Review in the History of the World
Well, maybe not, but it’s the dearest to my heart, now that I’ve read it (two years after its publication, and now only because Paolo Bacigalupi happened to mention it). When I walked out of the theater after seeing the last Star Wars movie, I had this tremendous feeling of liberation, because at last–after almost…
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New Stuff
In addition to “Wizard’s Six,” appearing in the June issue of F&SF, my story “Semaphore” will be one of the multitude of attractions in the anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, out any second now from Bantam… Also, “Snapdragons,” from the Vestal Review a few years back, was recently republished in a Chinese anthology…
Crooked House Fictions 