Recent content by Autumnal

Best wishes on mending! And consider reporting on imaginary items with random links. :)

David Hartwell argued that horror isn’t a genre, but a mode in which you can write any gene. Thus mysteries that are horror and mysteries that aren’t, sf that’s horror and sf that isn’t, and so on. Works for me. I finished two books today. Sometimes things line up that way. Gods and Monsters...

There’s good and bad popcorn, and cotton candy, whipped Jello, whatever. Very nearly anything can be done well or badly, and writing really good junk food escapism takes as much work as writing anything else really well, I think.

I think there’s much to be said for that assumption. If the new post isn’t a direct response, make that very clear first thing or just take the quote out. I do that fairly often, when I find I’ve moved on to something else.

As Orchestral Maneuvres in the Dark put it (voice repeats in English after Chinese):

That’s very hard, Umbran. Deepest sympathy and condolences from here.

I like it. Thanks.

I’d read that thing, jian.

I finished Hailey Piper’s All The Hearts You Eat, and it remained amazing throughout. It won’t be for everyone, but it does its thing so very well. In particular, without ever compromising her anger at the perpetrators of cruel injustice, Piper didn’t make her antagonists into cartoons. They...

Some of the best scenes in S.M. Stirling’s To Turn The Tide, with time travelers from 21st century Vienna to the Danubian frontier during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, have modern historians in the library of a nobleman’s library, weeping as thy examine title and read works none of us now ever can.

That Matrix theory struck me as a very strange plausible possibility early on. Still does. I was here at The Thirteenth Floor, minus the very last scene so that the movie ends with the cop in the rain. And eXistenZ, of course.

Over the decades, I’ve known several fairly successful folks - George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Harry Turtledove, Barbara Hambly, Dan Abnett, John Scalzi - for whom this doesn’t seem true at all. Just the opposite, in fact. Most of these owe some of their fame and success to being opinionated...

Definitely still true.