Zachary Gillan

SFF folks: if, for a certain podcast, I wanted to talk to a critic/scholar/reader about McCaffrey's PERN, who should I talk to? I know lots of folks are familiar/have thoughts, but I'm struggling to narrow it down.

Uncertain Sons — Undertow Publications

If you're reading for the Hugo Awards, please consider @thomasha.bsky.social 's "Uncertain Sons" in the Novelette category. Thank you. You can read the story here:

undertowpublications.com/uncertain-sons

Anybody know what the story with this (new?) pub is? The website linked doesn’t exist. Having an essay ready within a month isn’t how my life works but I like where their head’s at:

A tweet reading “Today's controversial opinion is that adaptation brain is the worst thing to happen to genre writers; one should create work that actively resists adaptation”

Don’t make me tap the sign

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAYNE!!

"Authors Should Be Objective" 71 men's works. To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes " only by writing the story that the novelist can discover-not his story-but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative?" Whether we call this implied author an "official scribe," or adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tillotson-the author's "second self"-it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author's most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner-and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reactions to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our response to the work. The reader's role in this relationship I must save for chapter v. Our present problem is the intricate relationship of the so-called real author with his various official versions of himself. We must say various versions, for regardless of how sincere an author may try to be, his different works will imply different ver-sions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one's personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works. These differences are most evident when the second self is given an overt, speaking role in the story. When Fielding comments, he gives us explicit evidence of a modifying process from work to

(nodding approvingly)

Aspirationally, I am definitely the person with a flower for a head (issue 10).

#SFinTranslation Essay" @molowrites.bsky.social on SFT, ISFDB, and the invisibility of the translator:

www.sfintranslation.com?p=16513

Anybody know what the story with this (new?) pub is? The website linked doesn’t exist. Having an essay ready within a month isn’t how my life works but I like where their head’s at:

Gordon Lish, smirking, from the afterlife:

Jotting down THOMAS=BACKPACK RAP

Tag yourself; I’m definitely in the tiny house surrounded by wolves on issue 7

I recall, it was a good story!!

A Maslow hierarchy only it’s been labeled from bottom to top curious, confused, anxious, afeared, and mysterium tremendum et fascinans

Fortunately weird fiction genreologists have been hard at work on a hierarchy of affects for exactly this situation

That one’s definitely up there for me too

Tag yourself; I’m definitely in the tiny house surrounded by wolves on issue 7

“Where are you throwing me?!?” is one of the great underappreciated simpsons lines, if you ask me

Weird Horror #12 and Hanoi’s Saud’s The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman (translated by the Arabic by Zia Ahmed)

(loudly): Get ready for fun, fun, fun!
(softly): The people are already here.
We don't need to keep hustling them like this, do we?

Casebound copies of Lynda Rucker’s three collections of Aickmanesque weird fiction

Read Lynda Rucker

I know, I know, I know

Here’s where I shamefully admit that I still haven’t watched SR despite everyone telling me I must

We call this “the Evenson” (and yes, agreed!)

A Maslow hierarchy only it’s been labeled from bottom to top curious, confused, anxious, afeared, and mysterium tremendum et fascinans

Fortunately weird fiction genreologists have been hard at work on a hierarchy of affects for exactly this situation

This is true. Characters should spend at least as much time being awe-stricken, confused, and anxious as they do being afraid

I have to ask…

Oh no, 100% sincere (I hate when weird fiction is boiled down to cosmic horror)

This is true. Characters should spend at least as much time being awe-stricken, confused, and anxious as they do being afraid

As a sort of general intro to critical/cultural theory, you could do worse than Peter Barry's Beginning Theory... though for more of a media literacy lens, Machin & Mayr's How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis and Daniel Chandler's Semiotics: The Basics are both very solid