You can read my new essay "So goes the love-hate relationship between science fiction and Kurt Vonnegut" over on Medium. The essay explores ... hell, the title sums it up perfectly. If you want to learn more then read the essay.
The essay was originally published in the Czech SF magazine XB-1 but this is the first English-language publication. Which is amusing, considering that I write in English. But so it goes (to quote Vonnegut's famous phrase).
I'll be a participating author at the Context 27 convention in Columbus from Sept 26 to 28. Context is a small literary-focused convention with a number of writing focused workshops and panels. Among the guests will be Auhtor Guest of Honor Jonathan Maberry, Editor Guest of Honor Betsy Mitchell, and Special Game Writing Guests Lucien Soulban, Jennifer Brozek, and Monica Valentinelli. Other authors attending include Gary A. Braunbeck, Maurice Broaddus, Geoffrey Girard, Sarah Hans, Ferrett Steinmetz, and many more.
My panel schedule will be
The last day to register at a discounted rate is this Wednesday, Sept. 17. Context is a great value and a great convention and I hope to see you there.
When I finished The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley, one word kept screaming through my mind: Epic! Epic! Epic! I wanted to shout to the world that this is what a truly epic fantasy should be.
And I say that as someone who has grown to hate epic fantasies.
Confused? Then understand this: In recent decades the term epic fantasy has become cemented to rather non-epic ideas of what constitutes fantasy, namely endless variations on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Epic fantasy has come to mean European-style castles and magic and dragons and quests, usually populated by European-styled people living European-styled lives with European-styled beliefs.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with fantasies like these, and obviously many people love them. But I for one am sick of them.
I've always believed the term epic fantasy meant more than Tolkien and endless knockoffs of his work. To me, fantasies are truly epic when they take you to worlds you never previously imagined and introduce you to people and events and magic you couldn't have dreamed up yourself.
I don't want my epic fantasies to be more of the same old. And that's one reason I absolutely fell in love with Hurley's The Mirror Empire.
Hurley's novel is set on a world I can barely attempt to describe, where shifting satellites power magical abilities and open doors to other dimensions. Now this world is approaching a critical alignment of these satellites, an alignment which allows people from other worlds to invade every two thousand years.
The setting is actually far more complicated than that, but to tell more would reveal some truly epic spoilers. All that matters is that Hurley has invested her time in creating a powerful world and you can't help but believe in this setting. Add in a story dealing with powerful themes like identity and slavery and genocide, and characters you'll love even when they reveal themselves as having oh-so-human failings, and the result is a great novel which will pull you through a literary wringer and leave you wishing immediately for the next book in the series.
The Mirror Empire is the best fantasy I've read this year and one of the best of recent years. This is also an epic fantasy for people who have grown to hate what passes for epic fantasies in today's marketplace.
The Mirror Empire is highly recommended and will be on my award shortlists. I suggest people check it out.
Yes, I'm in love with this book.
My writing is changing. Not that my writing ever stopped changing—hell, nothing in life is capable of not changing. But I'm contemplating a bigger change than normal. I've reached a point where the stories I've written until now will absolutely not be the stories I keep writing from here on out.
This explains why I've been obsessing lately on science fiction and worldviews, and asking people for their different SF worldviews. But it's also obvious that most people hate talking about theoretical constructs around literature. And I totally understand this hatred. The route by which literature reaches the mind and soul is through being read, not through being analyzed.
I say all this because I'm about to recommend a book which most people shouldn't read—Samuel R. Delany's About Writing. This is the best writing book I've ever read. I can't recommend it enough.
Except that most people probably shouldn't read it. If you're not a fiction writer, don't read it. If you're a new fiction writer needing to learn the basics, don't read it. If you're an established fiction writer who doesn't give a fictional crap about the theoretical side of what you're writing, don't read it.
But if you're a fiction writer who knows the basics, and who wants to discover what's holding your stories back from the ideal in your dreams, this is the book for you.
I am now rereading this book. I expect I will reread it on a regular basis. This is writing book I'd like to be buried with when I die so archaeologists of the future can see what I tried to do with my fiction.
About Writing by Samuel R. Delany is the best damn writing book around. But most people shouldn't read it.
The other day I discussed why science fiction is more of a worldview than an actual genre. But if that's true, exactly what type of worldview is SF? I'm trying to figure this out and I'd love to hear from people about what they consider as the science fiction worldview, or what they consider to be the markers of science fiction.
I almost asked people to define science fiction before realizing that a worldview doesn't fit with the idea of a hard and fast definition. Part of this is because worldviews continually change and flow across time and place. The other part is because I agree with what Nnedi Okorafor wrote in her must-read essay "Can you define African Science Fiction?", which is that all too often "labels suck."
As Okorafor says of labels:
“Yes, they are ways to simplify life. They make things easier to understand and faster to find. They have their uses. But when you take them too seriously, they are bullsh*t.”
So I'm not looking for definitions or labels to slap onto science fiction. But I am looking for viewpoints on what science fiction might be in our 21st century world. But to get us started I've also collected a number of famous and not-so-famous definitions of SF. But I hope no one considers these definitions as anything more than the beginning of a much larger discussion.
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section below. If you'd like to offer your thoughts in private, email them to me.
Here's my initial take on the science fiction worldview: The present as seen through a science-based view of the future.
In addition, here are a few of the definitions of SF which have stuck with me over the years: