"A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson..."
---Kirkus
Long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Crawford Award. Title short story listed for the 2000 O. Henry award.
Be a writer. Opportunities exist. You will be rewarded. Youth is important at first, especially when you are young. Those ambitions will serve you well in college. Your precocity–especially if you are a man–gives you a natural base for success at writing. Precocious ideas become an extension of maleness. But DON’T WORRY–even when you get [...]
Sat, March 30 2013 » Fiction, Poetry » No Comments
Sergey Brin, in a recent discussion of Google Glass, noted that smartphones are “emasculating.” Let’s look at a more or less standard definition of “emasculate”. (I generally hate arguments by pedantics who pull out dictionary definitions as a kind of proof text for an argument, but I think this is worth it). 1. Make (a [...]
Fri, March 29 2013 » Computers/Tech, Fiction, Polis » No Comments
‘[The gambler] was, in fact, a man so delicate in manner, so judicious in his choice of victims, that in the strictly masculine part of the town’s life he had come to be explicitly trusted and admired. People called him a thoroughbred. The fear and contempt with which his craft was regarded were undoubtedly the [...]
Wed, March 20 2013 » Fiction, Polis » No Comments
Do check out my friend David Schwart’s ebook serial novel, entitled Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: Gooseberry Bluff is not a school for the chosen ones. It’s a school for those who have run out of choices. An unlikely place for an international conspiracy. But after suspicious paranormal signatures are reported and a professor [...]
Mon, February 11 2013 » Fiction, Minnesota » 2 Comments
from Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality”, from The Novel, Volume 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton Univ. Press, 2006) “In addition to the gaps between shifting textual perspectives and the separation between subjectivity and speaker, we should also mention those between attempted reference and realization or typification and individuation, which hark back to Henry Fielding’s [...]
Wed, January 23 2013 » Fiction » No Comments
I have an essay in the latest issue of Cascadia Subduction Zone called “We Have Never Been Postmodern: ‘Walking Stick Fires’ and the Knowability of Science Fiction”, a response to Paul Kincaid’s essay “The Widening Gyre” (which you should read), if nothing else than a starting point for the ongoing, rolling conversation that it has [...]
Mon, January 21 2013 » Fiction » No Comments
Thu, January 17 2013 » Fiction » No Comments
“By this Poetical Description, you may perceive, that my ambition is not onely to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole World; and that the Worlds I have made, both the Blazing- and the other Philosophical World, mentioned in the first part of this Description, are framed and composed of the most pure, that is, [...]
Wed, January 9 2013 » Fiction, Polis » No Comments
I am really pleased to announce that my third book (and second short story collection), entitled Tyrannia, will be published by Small Beer Press in the Fall of 2013! I’m thrilled to be working with Small Beer Press again, and to go out and meet readers face to face in the world. I’ll post more [...]
Fri, January 4 2013 » Fiction, Tyrannia » No Comments
“Not that Levi-Strauss was opposed to narrative as such. Indeed, his monumental Mythologiques was intended to demonstrate the centrality of narrativity to the production of cultural life in all its forms. What he objected to was the expropriation of narrativity as the “method” of a “science” purporting to have as its object of study a [...]
Wed, December 19 2012 » Fiction » No Comments
This is a question that doesn’t get asked often enough, I think, particularly in an era of the unending “death of the novel” — which of course is just a fantasy; we are flooded with novels, and people one month out of the year strive to write one in that time span as a ledger [...]
Mon, December 17 2012 » Fiction » No Comments
Author of Fanged Noumena: “The inexorable logic of techno-industrial efficiency, on its anti-gravity vector, means that the only consistent motivation for leaving the earth is to dismantle the sun (along with the rest of the solar-system), but that doesn’t play well in Peoria. Unsurprisingly, therefore, those sensitized to political realities, media perceptions, and public relations [...]
Thu, October 11 2012 » Fiction » No Comments
I’m not really interested in ‘combating’ any review (it mentions “Walking Stick Fires”) which I don’t really think is bad anyway. But, broadly, this is a bad premise. Or at least not a very compelling one. For one the future is by definition is ‘incomprehensible.’ That is at least the starting point. The Yeats’ epigraph [...]
Tue, September 18 2012 » Fiction » No Comments
In an age of unending information, basing one’s work on a past of referentials can seem foolhardy (in America). One, educations are getting worse. Two, even nominally good educations will tend to miss a lot. We are no longer in medieval universities. There is little use (or should this be in quote marks?)” in including [...]
Sat, August 4 2012 » ?!?!?, Fiction, Poetry » 3 Comments
My short story “The Flowering Ape” is currently in the June issue of Asimov’s! It’s set in the Parameter world–one in which I’ve written many stories before (throughout a great deal of the space opera setting’s timespan). It’s a coming of age story about joyriding a spaceship. On the surface, at least. But it’s also [...]
Sun, May 20 2012 » Fiction » No Comments
Without getting into too much detail, and without debating the merits of Colson Whitehead’s new novel (which I haven’t read), I really thought this review by Glen Duncan of Whitehead’s new novel Zone One to be truly appalling. We can see the rhetorical gambit taken right in the first sentence, which he carries through through [...]
Sun, October 30 2011 » Fiction » 1 Comment
I’m making available one of my favorite previously unpublished stories, “Moonlight Is Bulletproof” available on e-book formats (and PDF form) for 99 cents at the excellent indie ebook store Weightless Books. Categorize this under “science fiction surreal mystery”. Download it here!
Wed, July 6 2011 » Fiction » No Comments
David Moles has the definitive word on swalegate as well as a passionate plea for sf’nal content in 2010 not to self-immolate in a cauldron of nostalgia and false-positive victimization and pseudo-religiosity. (I would add R.A. Lafferty to the list of spiritually minded sf writers of honesty, integrity and non-sloppiness.) All I could come up [...]
Wed, June 8 2011 » ?!?!?, Fiction » No Comments
Soooo much to cover of late–we were in the Czech Republic and Austria for 2 exhausting but glorious weeks and immediately afterwards I came down with the flu (and it looks like Kristin is going through the same opening salvos of the disease that I was a few days ago…grrr…). I also thought I should [...]
Sat, April 23 2011 » Fiction, Life Studies » No Comments
I very well might be biased, since Kristin is my wife, but A Brood of Foxes–a standalone novella that has just come out from Aqueduct Press–is a stunning work of fiction. But I will do my best to explain why I enjoy it so much, and why I believe it’s pushing the boundaries of fantasy [...]
Sun, March 6 2011 » Fiction » No Comments
