Interview: Jeff Vandermeer

Furious Fiction interviews Jeff Vandermeer, editor of The Weird anthology.

Video: Getting the Book Invented

Animation for a competition run by the Literary Platform to design motion graphics to accompany a prophetic recording by Douglas Adams from back in 1993 detailing the invention of the electronic book.

News: New Guy Gavriel Kay Novel

Guy Gavriel Kay's newest title, River of Stars, should be on shelves in the first quarter of 2013. It's set in the same lands as his novel Under Heaven, but several centuries later. Hopefully, the effect will be similar to that of reading The Lions of al-Rassan and the Sarantium Mosaic, two of his previous books which complimented each other wonderfully.

Interview: Neil Gaiman

Bestselling author, screenwriter and comics luminary Neil Gaiman, interviewed by Henry Jenkins as part of the Julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture. The lecture was hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius "Julie" Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for well over 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom.

Art: The Castle

"El Castillo" (The Castle) by Jorge Mendez Blake, 2008

   

Humor: How a Book is Born

 

"How a Book is Born" from Weldonowen

 

Link Round-Up: World-Building for Writers

Charmaine Clancy's W is for World Building Workshop can be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.

Denyse "Domynoe" Loeb's Alden.nu has five world-building outlines along with tons of other templates and lessons here.

Encyclopedia Mythica offers info and articles from A to Z on mythology, folklore and religion to help inspire and populate your fictional worlds.

Evidently pantsers can world-build, too, just in reverse: Kat Zhang's Backwards Worldbuilding.


For obscure words and vocabulary resources, you can't do much better online than The Phrontistery (warning, wordsmiths, highly addicting site.)

How to Draw Nice Maps

Kathy Steffen's article Jump-Start Your Imagination: Creative Writing Exercises for Worldbuilding offers a list of questions you answer about your world as building exercise.

Loren J. Miller's Mythopoets Manual covers in exquisite detail the many things writers might consider when writing the multi-cultural fictional setting.

Orion's Arm states their manifesto as "...to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences." Some decent examples for hard SF world-builders.

Stephanie Cottrell Bryant's 30 Days of World building tutorial can be read online or downloaded in several different formats, and covers a range of topics interesting to world builders. 

Merchandise: HTML Book Ends

HTML BookEnd Tags

Available for purchase at 55his.

Book Reading: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany reads from Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders at St. Marks Bookshop NYC on April 23 2012. Introduction by Brian Evenson, author of "Windeye." 

"Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders—explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking—propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations—with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men."

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Table of Contents: House of Fear

Prime Books has posted the table of contents for their upcoming anthology, Extreme Zombies edited by Paula Guran. The book hits shelves August 1, 2012, but you can pre-order it now at Amazon. Personally, I'd pick up a copy just for the George R.R. Martin story, but I'm a fan of Joe R. Lansdale and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, too.

Product Description: 

"It’s too late! The living dead have already taken over the world. Your brains have been devoured. Nothing is left but spasms of ravenous need—an obscene hunger for even more zombie fiction. Forget the metaphors and the mildly scary. You want shock, you want grue, you want disturbing, gut-wrenching, skull-crunching zombie stories that take you over the edge and go splat. You want the bloody best of the ultimate undead. You have no choice… you… must… have… Extreme Zombies!"

News: Creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award

The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association has just announced the creation of the A.E. van Vogt Award (The A.E.V.V.A.). Here's the press release:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada – The Winnipeg Science Fiction Association Inc (WINSFA) is delighted to announce the creation of the A.E. VAN VOGT Award (The A.E.V.V.A.).

Exactly 100 years ago, on April 26, 1912, Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. By July 1939, he had written his first Science Fiction story and had it professionally published.. He continued to write in Winnipeg until 1944 and it was during this time that one of his major stories “SLAN” was written. By 1995 he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) . He has been the ONLY Canadian Science Fiction Writer to be awarded this major title.