Post-Apocalypse Fiction in A Time of Apocalyptic Non-Fiction
Is now really the best time to write a post-apocalyptic novel? It is if you know what you are doing. And as a writer, let me assure you – I know what I’m doing. The sad fact is that we already live in a post-apocalyptic world. Several of them,...
Feanor et al. Did Nothing Wrong
How am I just now learning about the Feanor Did Nothing Wrong memes? For those who don’t know, the story goes a little something like this: So the Valar (kind of like the gods of Middle-Earth, but maybe like archangels or something in-between) started out by making literal heaven...
A Barnes and Ignoble Moment
By now the immediacy of the Barnes and Noble failed experiment of woke-casting classical literature has faded. These non-troversies rise and fall so fast it can be hard to keep up, so let’s have a quick recap courtesy of Penguin Random House and Barnes and Noble: To kick off...
“Literary” Awards
January means it’s time for successful authors to start laying the marketing groundwork for the award season. Hard pass. The digital panopticon was supposed to make it easier for the technocrats to fool the rubes. They see a distopian future with themselves standing atop the graveyard of liberty, fully...
A Mutual Vote of Confidence
Writer Daniel J. Davis burst onto my personal scene in 2019 with a string of solid D&D analyses that would have fit right into the earliest days of the OSR. His post on the post-apocalyptic assumptions built into D&D is one of those deep insights that have grown harder...
Stopped Clocks and the Midlist Midwit Diaspora
When they are right, they are right. Before we get to the meat of this post, let’s take a moment to recall the first rule: A quick search for “Scalzi whatever hiatus” takes six seconds and reveals five of the first six hits betray the lie of “nonstop”. But...
The Pinks are Revolting
Brian Neiemeir over at Kairos has been doing the blog-post convo that we’ve seen so little of since the great Twitter migration. This time around, he’s doing a deeper delve into a tweet-thread done by Ben Kai Wai Cheah: With all respect to Ben, this explanation puts the cart...
The Genre Détente
After an all out brawl – or at least the sort of petty slap fight that passes for such on Twitter – the anti-SJW crews have retreated to their respective corners. For those not in the know, we aficionados of the Pulp ethos look askance at the claims of...
Lessons From the Master
The other day somebody at one of the many renegade publishing internet water coolers asked if the works reviewed over at the Castalia House blog, of which I have done many, are worth reading. While I can’t speak for all of the reviewers over there, my own reviews run...
Dancing Around the Fire
Watching Amazon’s The Boys – more on that soonish – reminded me of my last desperate days stuck under the thumb of the Dinosaur Publishers. Back in the bad old days when I only rarely dipped my toes into NYC publishing waters in search of a rare good read,...