Blog Posts – Page 167 – The Skiffy and Fanty Show

My Superpower: Max Gladstone

Skiffy Fanty / July 24, 2014

My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Max Gladstone to talk about how the power of Oblivion relates to Full Fathom Five. *** My writer superpower is Oblivion. Obliviousness to surrounding conditions may seem more a liability than a superpower — the kind of “gift” that gets you pancaked by a city bus because you tried to read a Buzzfeed listicle and cross the road at the same time. Obliviousness leads to working through lunch and dinner because you didn’t realize it was 7pm already, to bad plays in poker and go (oh, I didn’t realize there were two kings on the board), to sleep deprivation and household mess (what dust bunnies in which corners, now?). But it does help the writing. See, distraction is an enemy of word count. You know how the Force connects all things, carrying impulses and emotions from one end of the galaxy to the other? Imagine being a Jedi — I mean, a fully-realized one like Obi-Wan in A New Hope or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, so in tune with the Force that it’s a state of being, not an ability you turn on and off. Walk down a street, as a Jedi, and emotions overwhelm you. Imagine trying to get anything done in that environment! Sure, Yoda and Obi-Wan lived on barren colony worlds to hide from Imperial death squads, but it’s quite possible that a peaceful remote hermitage is just plain more comfortable for folks with low-level always-on psionics.

Torture Cinema Polls

Torture Cinema Poll for @LonCon3 / Worldcon: You Decide; We Record in a Hotel Room

Skiffy Fanty / July 22, 2014

And it came to pass that four of the Skiffy and Fanty crew would be in attendance at the 2014 Worldcon in London. And the sf/f gods said, “Record Torture Cinema live in a hotel room…” And we said…YES! To celebrate being in London (and the World SF Tour), all of the films in the following poll are of British extraction. Vote wisely!

Blog Posts

Business Time: Direct-to-Consumer sales

Skiffy Fanty / July 20, 2014

Recently, HarperCollins announced that they’ve re-launched their site with a complete Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) store, selling physical and ebooks. Direct-to-Consumer sales are, for many companies, a great way to deal with disintermediation, that being, a disruption of the standard distribution chain. Companies like Amazon practice disintermediation, selling direct as retailers without needing field representatives and by surpassing/superceeding physical retail.

Blog Posts

Mining the Genre Asteroid: PAVANE by Keith Roberts

Paul Weimer / July 10, 2014

In 1588, Queen Elizabeth, the Faerie Queen, was assassinated. Without her leadership, and with the rise of English Catholics in response, Spain found it easy to occupy England and bring her back to Mother Church. And with England so tamed, the throne of St. Peter took back the entirety of Europe from Protestantism, and then the world. James Cook had the flag of the Pope, not of England, when he landed in Australia. Spain controls the entirety of the New World. The Church keeps a tight control over technology and culture, as well, shutting down obvious lines of development. Semaphone wires, coal fired trains, and a residual feudal culture dominate England and the world. Black powder guns are still state-of-the-art weapons. Such tight control has its costs, and its victims. Now, though, almost four centuries after Elizabeth’s death, in a small region of England, the dominance of the Church in matters temporal and spiritual — in England and the world — may finally begin to loosen. All of this can be found in Keith Roberts’ alternate history classic, Pavane.

Torture Cinema Polls

Torture Cinema Poll for July 2014: You Decide!

Skiffy Fanty / July 10, 2014

I’m late in dropping the Torture Cinema episode from June, but that doesn’t mean you all can’t vote for our end-of-the-month torturefest! You know the drill. Voting will end on Monday.

Blog Posts

My Superpower: Patty Templeton

Skiffy Fanty / July 8, 2014

My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Patty Templeton to talk about how the power of hoeing history for the strange relates to There Is No Lovely End. ——————————————– Who likes hoeing history for the unexpected? Me. Dude, I will hoe history ALL NIGHT LONG. Ahem. Hmm. Let me rephrase. I LOVE BOOKS! I’ve written them, written about them, sold them at used and new bookstores, and did a five year stint as a Readers’ Advisor in a public library. I’ve noticed that when I’m reading fiction, it is my fun time. When I’m reading nonfiction – oh man, grab your notebook, girly…because here comes storybrain. All of the sparks for my best stories, and my debut novel – There Is No Lovely End – came to me from reading nonfiction. And not only nonfiction, but sleazy, peculiar, or mysterious nonfiction. I have become a Queen of Queer Antiquities, a Curator of Curious Histories, a Burrower for the Bizarre.