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Finding Filipinos in Science Fiction and Fantasy

A decade ago, whenever I mentioned Filipinos in science fiction and fantasy, genre fans here and abroad would mention two novels to me: Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Now I haven’t read Cryptonomicon, but I have read Starship Troopers. My initial impression with the book was that here was a book that featured a Filipino (well, Filipino-American) protagonist! As I grew older, I realized Starship Troopers was a squandered opportunity (aside from Heinelin’s pro-military propaganda). I had questions like:

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Mining the Genre Asteroid: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Donald Hogan is a spy. Meanwhile, his roommate, Norman House, suspects nothing of this. To him, Donald is a self employed dilettante. Bookish, maybe, but not a bad guy. Norman has other things to occupy him, like his rising star at General Technics. General Technics is a corporation vast enough and powerful enough to contemplate a political and economic takeover of an small, refugee-laden African nation which by all rights should be absorbed, conquered, or writhing in civil war and discontent like much of the continent. And yet it is not. Why?

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Business Time – Impatience, Rapid Release, and Saturation

This has been a busy week in publishing news. A lot of people are talking about authorearnings.com and/or the Digital Book World response to same. Lots of people are talking about that report, but since I’m not a statistician and I don’t have access to Amazon’s actual sales numbers, I’m going to talk about something I *do* know about, and that’s rapid release schedules in genre publishing. Prompted by this New York Times article, I wanted to talk about my observations about reader impatience, quick-to-market releases, and market saturation. Rapid release has been going on in genre publishing for quite some time. The romance category has numerous authors who write incredibly quickly, keeping their names fresh. In SF/F, we have our prolific authors as well. Seanan McGuire, Chuck Wendig, and more.  Angry Robot and several other small/medium publishers have shorter production windows, meaning that the time from acquiring the book to releasing it is less, sometimes much less, than the 12-15 months you might see at other times.

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My Superpower: Christian Baines

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 Christian Baines to talk about how his power of recognizing non-humans relates to The Beast Without. —————————— My name’s Christian Baines, and I’m one of a handful of people blessed, cursed, enriched, soundly spanked or however you want to see it with the ability to immediately spot creatures that look human, but aren’t. You know the list. Vampires, werewolves, demons, Kardashians. Kidding. I really wouldn’t know a Kardashian if I fell over one.

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My Superpower: Kyle Burnett

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 Kyle Burnett to talk about how the power of Cinematic Superimposition relates to Big Driver. ————————————————– Origin stories for most superheroes involve tragedy of one type or another. My story is no different. My super power is called Cinematic Superimposition. What this does is allow me to see and hear everything in terms of cinematic production value. Growing up, I experienced trauma of both the emotional and physical variety. When I was four years old, I watched my three year old brother fall into a river and drown in front of me. I helplessly watched my father deteriorate from Huntington’s Chorea before finally passing when I was seventeen. In a single year, I cremated my step father, my sister, and another of my little brothers. It happened to be the same year my grandfather passed, but I wasn’t involved in his cremation.

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The Disquieting Guest — Manuscript Found in VHS Player

So I watched V/H/S 2 tonight. I had passed on the original, but heard that the follow-up was a distinct improvement. It was something of a mixed bag, though “Save Haven,”  the segment directed by Gareth (The Raid- Redemption) Evans, was pretty effective. The film is yet another found-footage exercise, and while it finds some pretty ingenious ways of using the format (I particularly liked the dog-mounted camera), I did find myself wondering if this was really the most effective way of telling these stories. And so I present a few ramblings on found-footage horror, hoping for at least semi-coherence.

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