So, over on Twitter dot com recently, Hannah Moskowitz wrote a very smart thread about how publishing should oughta take some lessons from fanfic. And then Max Gladstone wrote an also very smart thread in response to say that mainstream publishing maybe already does take those lessons. And then a bunch more people said a bunch more things about fanfiction and genre fiction and literary fiction; and my friend Maureen (she blogs at By Singing Light and is the best!) and I decided to sit down and thrash it all out. (The title is a joke. We don’t really crack…
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Since its release in 2016, Naomi Alderman’s The Power has been impossible to miss, receiving accolades from the New York Times and President Barack Obama, among many many others. The premise is that women — through a new organ called a skein, located at their collarbones — suddenly become more physically powerful than men, able to transmit strong jolts of electricity. Things go downhill pretty quickly. I resisted The Power because I am tired of power and the things people do to keep it. 2016 was the year Alton Sterling was killed in my home state. 2016 was the year…
Leave a CommentY’all, I’m thinking about changing the name of this project to Shortly Ever After. Would that be fun, y/n? I’m also commissioning a little graphic for it, which I’m unduly excited about. We are now in a new situation where my brilliant friend Julia introduced me to the bibliographic and note-taking app Zotero, which I have been using to tremendous effect in several unrelated areas of my life. One of these is that I now have Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed and Tor dot com original fiction and Strange Horizons and Uncanny in feeds, and whenever they post…
Leave a CommentSo the time has come for Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon, and like last time (or the time before? idk), I was supposed to have plans this day and then the plans got NOT EVEN CANCELED, just rescheduled, which is like, the best of all possible worlds. (The plans were a crawfish boil. I’d have been so sad if it was canceled.) This will be my master post, and I will update it as I go along! Feel free to ignore everything, but your takeaway regardless should be that readathons are the best. In Conclusion Y’all, I’m going to be super real…
Leave a CommentShow of hands who all was aware that Hobby Lobby did a crime of smuggling antiquities out of Iraq? Because I remembered when this story broke and was thus distantly aware of HobLob’s weird antiquities situation, but I mentioned it to Friend of the Podcast Ashley and she was flabbergasted. However, HobLob’s religious agenda for America — including but not limited to their smuggling of antiquities — is the subject of my latest nonfiction read, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, so strap in. Candida Moss and Joel Baden break down four areas in which the family that…
Leave a CommentRemember the time I claimed to be a feminist and an SF fan but then I reached an advanced old age without ever reading a super foundational SF text by a nineteenth-century feminist author? WELL THAT TIME IS ONGOING but fortunately my friend Alice has extended the hand of mercy unto me and proposed a co-hosting of a Frankenstein readalong in the month of May. Even more excitinger, there exists a new annotated edition of Frankenstein, published by the good folks at Liveright, and I am here to report that it is amahzing. The annotations (from what I can tell…
1 CommentIt is a true blessing when havers of fancy knowledge, persons whose knowledge of a given complicated subject is at a ten, are willing and able to take time out of their busy schedules to explain their complicated subject to people whose starting level of knowledge is at a zero or one. Robert Sapolsky, fancy scientist and author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, is a person like this. Behave ranks up with Daniel Kahneman’s superb Thinking Fast and Slow for explaining complicated science to a lay reader. Sapolsky explores the regions of the brain…
Leave a CommentWelp, this is going to be hard to review without spoilers. But I’ll do my best to segregate the spoilers from the non-spoilers in a secure bunker where contamination won’t be possible. (That’s a humorous This Mortal Coil joke for you.) Catarina Agatta has spent the last two years fending for herself after the dangerous corporation Cartaxus showed up and took away her only companions: Lachlan Agatta the world’s leading gene-coder and may be the planet’s only hope for wiping out the deadly Hydra virus. Then a supersoldier named Cole arrives at Cat’s house with the news that her father…
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