(Humboldt’s vision of complex, interlocking ecosystems…and the holding pond near my house, where an animal has built a home in the midst of trash, plastic, poor water quality. This animal has no particular rights in this context, nor could this animal be said to be remarkable beyond simply wanting to survive. Given that the world […]
As we all know, authors make great predictors of the future. Looking at anyone’s twitter or facebook page will prove that the average writer (1) has an opinion and (2) has a brilliant, all-seeing mind. Therefore, it’s important for all peoples that we predict the future. Here are my predictions for 2016. Happy New Year! […]
My year in review included writing two novels, working on some stuff for other media, teaching at Yale and UBC, book tours in Canada, Sardinia, and the Netherlands. My wife and I co-edited an anthology titled Sisters of the Revolution and we published a huge omnibus of the fiction of Leena Krohn. The Annihilation movie […]
Ever since the Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination conference in Amsterdam early in 2015, I’ve been thinking about how to articulate ideas about our reality and our fiction–our storytelling about the present and the future. I find myself drawn to consider what is going extinct in fiction and what is pushing up through the cracks to […]
This week, Penguin Classics releases a reprint of Thomas Ligotti’s first two collections, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe in a single volume. I was fortunate enough to write the foreword to the book. I’ve been a reader of Ligotti since that first collection–we have a first edition in the house. I urge everyone […]
(Shared Worlds 2015 poster and student writing book cover. Art by Jeremy Zerfoss.) For eight years I’ve been a part of Shared Worlds, a unique SF/Fantasy writing camp located at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I currently serve as co-director of the camp, with founder Jeremy L.C. Jones, with my main focus running the creative […]
I thought that this review by Niall Harrison at Strange Horizons of James Bradley’s Clade was pretty fascinating and extremely useful. I like that he acknowledges the potential disconnect between the reality we’re headed toward and the way this reality is depicted in fiction—and just how difficult it is for fiction writers to tackle the […]
This summer I’m a guest at the Isle of Stories Festival in Sardinia, with an event July 3 (more details here). I’m taking some writing with me–about done with a novella entitled “Bliss” and some short stories. But I’m also taking some books! And what books. Great stuff has come in the door recently. In […]
A few things of interest have occurred in the past week or two, and I wanted to draw your attention to them. —Ex Machina is out in theaters, a film written and directed by Alex Garland. Since Garland’s on board to write and direction the movie of my novel Annihilation, I was curious to see […]
Ann and I are now in the process of reading for The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage, which will appear in 2016. This huge anthology of well over 500,000 words will collect the best and most unusual SF stories from approximately 1900 to 2000. This requires a lot of reading and research. Every […]