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I Create Gods All the Time – Now I think One Might Exist, Says Fantasy Author Terry Pratchett

June 22, 2008 /

Terry Pratchett

“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should. It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I’m not used to this.

As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I’m rather pleased with Annoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of bent egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too). But since contracting Alzheimer’s disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe.”

(via The Daily Mail)

RIP: Author Robert Asprin

May 23, 2008 /

As a fan of the Myth Adventure series I was saddened to find out that sci-fi, fantasy author Robert Asprin died from a heart attack. He will be missed.

Via his website:

“On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend. He is survived by his mother, his sister, his daughter and his son, and his cat, Princess, not to mention countless friends and fans and numerous legendary fictional characters. He will be greatly missed.”

BBC Radio Interview with Terry Pratchett

May 21, 2008 /

http://www.lspace.org/ftp/images/misc/kirby-draws-terry-2.jpg

“Terry Pratchett has sold more than 55 million books worldwide. He was the UK’s best selling author until JK Rowling came along, he’s been awarded an OBE and won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for Literature. He’s a multi-millionaire and his fans love him – and he has an awful lot of them. But he hasn’t got his health. He’s been diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 60. For this week’s On The Ropes he talks to John Humphries about his life, his work and how he’s coping with a disease that – so far – has no cure.”

(via BBC Radio: On The Ropes. h/t SF Signal. Picture by Josh Kirby)

An Interview with Jennifer Stevenson- Author of “The Brass Bed”

May 3, 2008 /

The Brass Bed Cover

Jennifer Stevenson is the author of ‘Trash Sex Magic’, and most recently wrote a trilogy of sexy, funny, romantic fantasy, the first of which was recently released called ‘The Brass Bed’ (Ballantine Books). She’s been writing for 25 years and lives in the Chicago area with her husband of 30 years and her two cats.

The Brass Bed begins with the heroine, Jewel Heiss, a tough fraud cop investigating a fake sex therapist, Clay, who has been using an antique brass bed to lure his customers. Trapped inside the bed is Lord Randall (Randy), who in 1811 was cursed and turned into an incubus by his magician-mistress for being lousy in bed. The curse was this: satisfy one hundred women or be trapped in the bed forever. Lucky Jewel was number one hundred, and Randy becomes her personal sex slave. The choice: Clay or Randy? This is where the fun really begins.

I don’t usually read much fiction, but found myself flying through all three books (‘The Velvet Chair’ is the second [coming out in late May], and ‘The Bearskin Rug’ is the third). There’s plenty of humor, sex and magic to keep anyone reading into the wee hours. The ending in the last book (‘The Bearskin Rug’) was a bit of a surprise. If you like funny romantic fantasy, you’ll love this series.

I sat down with Jennifer to discuss her new book, and to get some of her views on magic, and sex demons.

See also:

Trash Sex Magic review by Wes Unruh

[display_podcast]

Review of the MMO ‘Outside’

April 2, 2008 /

I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

The reviewer gives it a 7/10.

ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:

The Masai warriors’ guide to England
by Andrew Pierce

Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."

The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.

"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."

Plot Synopsis Project

March 19, 2008 /

For all you aspiring writers out there, there’s a great project going on via LiveJournal with various authors who are posting their plot synopsis that they sent along with their pitches to sell their novels. Via Joshua Palmatier (jpsorrow):

“A few weeks ago, after I posted the question/interview about plot synopsis and my answers, Chaz Brenchley, desperance suggested that perhaps someone should post examples of the plot synopses they used to sell their novels, the ones that were for books already published and out there. I thought this was a great idea and with his permission (and participation) I set up what I’m calling the “Plot Synopsis Project”. Essentially, I gathered together a group of authors who were willing to post an entry about their own plot synopsis writing technique as well as a sample copy of one of their own plot synopses OR post an entry about how they got published without using a plot synopsis, to show everyone how different people write their synopses, and that it isn’t necessarily required to get published. There are other routes. I would say that MOST people have to write a plot synopsis in order to get published though . . . and most of us hate doing it. I personally do.

And just to clarify, by plot synopsis, I mean the (usually) 3-5 page summary of the book that is (usually) included in a submission package to the agent or editor, along with a cover letter or query letter, and sometimes with the first few chapters of the novel. This is not the one paragraph pitch, or even the one line pitch. Some of the other authors will talk about these other things as well in their discussion, but the main thrust of these posts is the 3-5 page synopsis.

So, what you have here is my entry in the Plot Synopsis Project. At the end of every participating post in the project, there will be links to the other authors’ blogs and their posts there. So take a moment to read through what I have to say, and then at the end, click on one of the links to find out what some other authors have to say about the subject. Hopefully, this will help all of the aspiring writers out there.”

Here’s a link of the writers involved separate from any plot synopsis, in case one wants to avoid an accidental spoiler, via Tobias Buckell’s site.

(Related: “Plot Synopsis Project, and the Problem with LiveJournal” via Uncertain Principles)

(Thanks Smoking Pigeon!)

Timothy Beal: Religion and It’s Monsters

March 13, 2008 /

“Timothy K. Beal is Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He has published eight books, including Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Beacon, 2005), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Publishers Weekly‘s ten Best Religion Books of 2005; Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), which was a Reviews in Religion and Theology Editor’s Choice; and The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, and Annihilation in Esther (Routledge, 2007).

He has published essays on religion and American culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been featured on radio shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and The Bob Edwards Show. He is co-editor, with Tod Linafelt, Georgetown University, of the book series Afterlives of the Bible with the University of Chicago Press. I was impressed with the perspective that Timothy brought to one of his books, Religion and Its Monsters, and Timothy made some time to discuss various aspects of the book with me.”

(via TheoFantastique)

The Fantastic in Art and Fiction

March 4, 2008 /

“Sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines.

In order to take maximum advantage of the materials in the Cornell collections, it seemed best not to adhere to a strict definition of either the Fantastic or its predecessor, the Marvelous, as these have emerged in literary criticism and theory. It will be useful, nevertheless, to note some general markers which have informed the choices implicit in these pages. In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.”

(The Fantastic in Art and Fiction)

A Voyage to Arcturus

March 22, 2007 /

A Voyage to Arcturus

The full text of the gnostic sci-fi novel A Voyage to Arcturus, a book Alan Moore cites as one of the best underrated books of all time, is available for free on the Gutenberg Project.

A Voyage to Arcturus full text

You can also buy it in print, though the edition with an introduction by Alan Moore appears to be out of print.

Starship Stormtroopers (Michael Moorcock on sci-fi and fantasy fiction)

March 13, 2007 /

An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of the world. A ‘rebel’, certainly, he or she does not assume ‘rebellious charm’ in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high relief in the currently popular Star Wars series which also presents a somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious ‘Force’ which unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian ‘samurai’ again?) and upon whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights Templar. Star Wars is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a compendium of other people’s ideas) in its implicit structure — quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around their necks.

Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o’clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. it raises ‘instinct’ above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.

Full Story: Archive.org.

(Thanks Danny Chaoflux).

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