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Blog Posts

Business Time – Many Paths up the Mountain

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This last weekend, I was at BaltiCon in Hunt Valley, MD. I had the pleasure of being on a number of business/business of writing panels, and I noticed something very cool that I wanted to loop back around to talk about. In one of the panels, I was the only traditionally-published author out of a group of five, but there was no animosity, no rancor, no posturing. It was five creatives who had all taken different paths to getting their work out into the world. It is my hope that we’re at a place where writers and creators looking to work in the SF/F prose field can approach the business with open eyes and a sense of freedom — of possibility. There are many paths up the mountain, and as many ways of having a career as there are authors (and considering how some authors reboot their careers, there may be more ways than there are creators). It’s not just Traditional and indie/self-publishing — there are a hundred gradations and combinations. Here are just a few:

Awards Season

2014 Hugo Award Episode Pack: Download away!

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If you’re a Hugo Voter, you’ll have seen the little document in the Fancast category from us which includes recommended episodes from 2013 — one from each of our episode types.  To make it a little easier for folks to download these episodes, we’ve put up a .zip file containing all four mp3 files, which should be easy enough to load up into your player of choice. The file can be downloaded here.  If there are issues, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or contact us at skiffyandfanty[at]gmail[dot]com! Enjoy!  

Blog Posts

Book Review: Veil of the Deserters by Jeff Salyards

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In a border kingdom of the Syldoon Empire, a long-range military unit has gotten itself too tangled with local politics for its own good. Its commander, Captain Killcoin, having lost one of the few people who can keep him all together with his dangerous mind-warping weapon Bloodsounder, is in a heap of trouble with higher ups in the Empire. Trouble enough that one of the most dangerous people in the Empire has been fetched to bring him home — his sister. The completion of Killcoin’s task and the journey home to the capital  is not going to be a straight road by any means. And chronicling, witnessing, watching this all, an unlikely protagonist — a scribe, with little military skill, who is only slowly shedding his callowness. He’s hired by the Syldoon for purposes only now becoming clear. Purposes that could shake an Empire. Arkamondos is in way, way over his head.

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Languages Matter: Some Thoughts on Language and Dialect

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I want to expand on what I have written in my essay, “Languages, Dialects and Accents:  Why Our Voices Matter.” Much has been said about the use of dialect in science fiction and the outcry that follows. I would like to see more of such discussions because we have been shying away from issues that really matter to us. Perhaps, it is the shift from white Anglo science fiction to a more international/world science fiction that has started the ball rolling. For a long time, the world has been white, male and painfully Anglo-centric, not to mention US-centric. Now we have new voices coming into the song, and some are naturally reacting rather angrily, I would say. Why are we fixating on English – and for that matter, proper grammatical English English? Let’s not bring in the American versus British spelling argument. Let’s talk about English. Why do we insist SFF writers write in English? Probably because science fiction, at the moment, is dominated by the Americans and the British? Bear in mind that science fiction is also written in Mandarin Chinese, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Bahasa. Why does English have so much hegemony in the SFF-sphere?

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Have Online Dictionary, Will Travel: AMC’s Turn (2014)

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At the moment, I’m in Houston for Comicpalooza. It’s been a wonderful convention, but I’m short on sleep, so I’ll apologise ahead of time if I’m not making much sense. 🙂 Anyway, there’s a new show I’ve been watching, and it’s on AMC. If you like American Revolutionary War era history (like me,) you might give it a try. It’s called TURN, and it’s based on the true story of America’s first spy ring.

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The Disquieting Guest — A Few Thoughts On ‘The Quiet Ones’

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The Marvel logo that introduces the company’s movies (and their respective trailers) is a pretty sharp piece of work. That flipping by of comic book images primes the viewers, gesturing toward the history of all that came before. I bet that many viewers feel a bit of a thrill the moment that logo appears, even if — when seeing a trailer for the first time — they don’t know what movie is coming up after those images. I have much the same reaction to the new Hammer logo, which you can check out here. Hammer Studios are a storied institution. They brought Quatermass to the big screen and revived Gothic horror with 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein. That first pairing of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee has a hallowed place in horror history, as do the films that followed. But the late-sixties and early-seventies brought difficult times to Hammer. Films such as Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist changed the face of the horror film. Hammer’s period pieces, which had been so radical with their colour, gore and sexuality (tame though those elements appear today), now seemed quaint. Attempts to modernize (Dracula A.D. 1972) were met with mixed success (to put it kindly). The last theatrical hurrah was To the Devil… A Daughter in 1976, an attempt both to follow up the earlier success of  The Devil Rides Out and mimic The Exorcist.

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