rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno ~ Juvenal Modern Translation: Whelp, I sure didn’t see that coming. Recently at a convention, my friend Paul di Filippo moderated a panel where he asked several of us about writing near-future science fiction. Paul invoked Charles Stross’ World building 404: The unknown unknowns regarding worldbuilding, especially in […]

I run an online writing school, and part of that means coming up with new class ideas, ones that interest and engage and allow people to find new tools for their writerly use. Classes such as How to Write Steampunk and Weird Western, Using Literary Techniques in Genre Writing, and How to Write Flash Fiction. […]

In a previous Another Word column, I got grumpy about dystopias. They’re fun, but often also a bit of a cop-out from a worldbuilding point of view. A dystopia instantly feels momentous, serious, tense. The more dystopian the setting, the weightier the story, increasing the chances that the story will be taken seriously. A dystopia […]

I stood on stage at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, England. It was October of this year, and I was finishing a five-month (yes, you read that right, five-month) tour supporting my latest book, Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decades Sci-Fi Exploded. This was the biggest audience I’d had so […]

Today is a good day to write! With Halloween in the rearview and the other momentous end of year holidays not quite gnawing at our ankles, some of you are naturally going to turn your thoughts to NaNoWriMo. For anyone who hasn’t heard of this ancient challenge, the basics are: you write a 50K novel […]

I’m here to talk to you about the Slow Fiction Movement. Okay, that’s not a thing, but it should be. Much as slow food encompasses every aspect of production, culminating with consumption, the idea of slow fiction speaks to every stage of a story’s life cycle. I should clarify that I’m not talking about drafting […]

This past August was my first time at GenCon in Indianapolis and I was asked to be on a panel about story revision. In preparation, the savvy moderator sent us a list of possible questions to review, so that we could highlight the ones we were most interested to answer. Among the list, was a […]

Motion was once the enemy of time. Dust still is. Depending on when and where it is, a clock in motion may lose increments of time in the form of water drops, humidity, sun angles or clouds, gear ticks, pendulum swings, grit, gravitational pull, and more. One of humanity’s great challenges is to reduce those […]

I once caught a burglar and made twenty bucks. I can winnow Twenty Dollar Burglar down to a pretty boring story. Here’s the tl;dr: I once had a minimum wage job at an all-night answering service. Some of the gig was answering 24-hour hotlines, mostly for engineering firms that serviced the Alberta oil patch. The […]

I love me a space epic full of improbability drives and warp mechanics as much as any science fiction reader, and I’ve written more than a few stories in that milieu, gleefully flinging about concepts like living spaceships, FTL, and galaxy-spanning brains. But I will admit that my affection is most firmly claimed by quieter, […]

Readers who pay attention to science fiction in translation may have noticed a steady growth of the number of works written in Chinese and translated into other languages in recent years. An ongoing collaboration that started in 2015 between Clarkesworld Magazine and Storycom continues to make a significant contribution in presenting over thirty Chinese science […]

Most people hate the sound of their own voice. I was never that kid. My parents gave me my very own cassette recorder at the age five or six. When I wasn’t listening to read-along Alice in Wonderland, I would lock myself in the bathroom and record inspirational speeches about how important it was for […]

Last year I returned to one of my old loves. I’d put it aside for a while: things were busy, there was never time, it took so much energy from writing efforts. And then a friend asked about it and, well . . . I speak of tabletop role-playing games, and the empress of them all, Dungeons & […]

Economies of time, independence, technology, and privacy intersect in many places, especially in this mostly shiny now-future we programmed for ourselves. For me, one intersection is primarily in my refrigerator. Another’s in how I get where I want to go. As a person with mobility and weight-bearing concerns, what I’m somewhat reluctantly giving up in […]

I’ll always be grateful to Steven Barnes. At Orycon 2012, he passed on advice that made a huge difference to my writing. Steven said, when we get a story idea, we usually know either the character or the problem. To develop the story, we can ask ourselves the following questions: If we know the character, […]

I recently asked my circle of friends (both in person and on the interwebs): “What do authors owe us?” It’s an age-old, deceptively simple question that should have a simple answer, right? But the further I delved into the nuances of the answers I received, the muddier the waters became. As social media continues to […]

I do not have many recurring nightmares, but in one that continues to horrify me, I am backstage at a theater watching a play. Suddenly the flustered stage manager braces me. “So-and-so didn’t show up,” she says. “You have to go on for him!” Quaking, I reply, “But . . . but . . . but I’m not an actor. I […]

Overthinking everything is a cheap hobby. There’s no start-up cost, and you don’t need a library card to do the research anymore, because Internet. It doesn’t require heavy equipment, so you can do it on the bus or the beach. When I encounter a shiny new idea or a radically different new perspective on something, […]

I love my job. No, really. I love my job. Not writing (which I adore), but my other job. The eight-to-four, five-days-a-week office job. You might call it my day job, but really, it’s just my job. And I love it. Have I made that clear? It’s not a glamourous job. It’s not exciting or […]

The old perception of how publishing works goes something like this: the author delivers the finished work to their publisher, goes through a few editing passes, and after that, their responsibility is done, aside from having to appear wherever the publisher or their agent books them. There’s room for the reclusive genius in this model: […]

In science fiction and fantasy, scientific heroics sometimes occur in concentric rings—in the lab, in the field, on the ship. They come in career rings also—from astronomer and physicist to theoretical chemist and astrophysicist (there are a lot of flavors of physicists in hard SF), to linguists, xenobiologists, and more. Out of all of these, […]

At the start of the 1970s, two forms of popular culture were on the rise: science fiction and funk. Sci-fi had a huge breakthrough in 1968 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; at the same time, funk architects like James Brown and Sly Stone were forcing the music to progress at an exhilarating rate. […]

Story creates alternate realities. The laws of our universe, as we imperfectly understand them, are where these realities begin, yet the results are not always bound by those rules. This is especially true in the literature of the fantastic, of course, and it’s something I don’t really need to tell Clarkesworld readers.  So, why am […]

In 2013, my wife Alyx and I blew up our life, lunged across the continent, and started afresh in Toronto. After twenty-two years of comfort and stability in Vancouver, we were on the hunt for a new home and new jobs, and had to renegotiate all the relationships one takes for granted when one is […]

I have a friend—more than one of them, really—who complains about having encountered a phenomenon that I personally would consider a fate worse than death. They are always writers, and they complain that “writing has spoiled reading for them.” They’re just too aware of the mistakes, they say. The nuts and bolts are way too […]

In 1965, Bantam reprinted Dave Wallis’ one-generation apocalypse, Only Lovers Left Alive. The cover was a flat, empty ground with painted figures in monochrome. A motorcycle-jacketed girl stands Bullitt-cool in the foreground, toting a rifle; a young man looms behind her in helmet and goggles. Far behind him is the rest of the gang, one […]

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Janet Kagan’s Nebula-nominated, Hugo award-winning novelette “The Nutcracker Coup.” Published in Asimov’s in 1992, it’s the story of Marianne, a human functionary of the galactic government who unwittingly sparks a revolution on the planet Rejoicing, which is populated by charming, porcupine-like aliens suffering under the heavy-booted rule of a cruel […]

Recently, Tor Books published Invisible Planets, the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese SF (by “contemporary,” I mean roughly something like “written during the 21st century”). I was both the anthology’s editor and translator. As I started to do publicity for the book, one question came up again and again: What motivated me to do […]

When Clarkesworld asked for this essay, I said yes. I almost always say yes. It’s a longstanding habit, born of my hungriest days when I was making music full time. It led to some ridiculous itineraries, say Dallas, TX to Superior, WI in a day, because they were good gigs and they paid well, and […]

I’ve been thinking about voice a lot, about who speaks, who is heard, and how. Automated voices in particular are interesting, found in everything from our handheld robots to our future means of travel off planet. Who—and what—we listen to, and don’t, and why, and how? This impacts us greatly going forward. Also I’ve been […]