Here’s my latest column for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s newsletter Freelance… *** They’ve become a fixture at science fiction conventions: people wearing goggles, leather coats, high laced boots and aviator caps, carrying strange devices of glass, brass and leather. They look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time. They’re aficionados of a sub-genre of science …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/08/Analog-and-Digital-TV.mp3[/podcast] Technology changes, new ways of doing things driving out the old. Take digital television. In fact, you’ll have to: by August 31, over-the-air television stations in most major Canadian cities are being required to stop broadcasting in analog and start broadcasting in digital. Merriam-Webster defines analog as “of, relating to, or being a mechanism …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/08/The-Vernacular-of-Fiction.mp3[/podcast] It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this column that I write fiction in addition to non-fiction: specifically, science fiction and fantasy for both adults and young adults. Which is why Ben Zimmer’s recent article in The New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, describing the findings of lexicographers using modern computer databases …
Big news this week: DAW Books, publisher of my three science fiction novels Lost in Translation, Marseguro and Terra Insegura, and my upcoming Lee Arthur Chane fantasy Magebane, has bought the first two-books of a new YA fantasy series, the first book of which is called Masks. Here’s the “high-concept” description from my proposal: In …
I had a phone call recently from my editor at DAW Books, Sheila Gilbert, letting me know that DAW wants to bring out an omnibus edition of Marseguro and Terra Insegura in April 2012. We batted around titles and settled on The Helix War. It’s still a ways until April, but lo and behold, I …
This one popped up at Just Deb, and is part of a regular feature she calls Marvelous Middle Grade Mondays: This is the first book in the Shards of Excalibur series. And it’s going to be a good one-series I mean. Loved the first and how Arthurian legend was woven into a troubled teens life. …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/07/Event-Cloaking.mp3[/podcast] It’s just possible you haven’t heard yet that the final Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, has just been released…although if that’s the case you’re probably also living on another planet and aren’t reading this at all. Harry Potter, boy wizard, makes very good use, over the course of …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/07/Belly-Button-Biodiversity.mp3[/podcast] It’s summer, that time of year when belly buttons escape their natural habitat of swimming pools and beaches and wander free in the oddest places, from the library to the shopping mall (although unlike the grins of Cheshire cats, they rarely appear without their owners). But as you survey these navel maneuvers, don’t think …
Which means I get to spend the next few days re-reading my own book, and hoping the only errors I see are little ones that are easily corrected, and not major “what-was-I-thinking-aargh-it’s-too-late-to-fix-it-now!” ones. Here’s the title and byline from the title page. I love the little airship logo, which appears at the start of each …
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/06/Dawn-of-the-Flying-Cars.mp3[/podcast] “Hey, dude, where’s my flying car?” is a cry every science fiction writer has heard—and every science fiction reader has uttered—since the future supposedly arrived on January 1, 2001, and we found ourselves still stuck to the ground, rolling along on rubber tires. The problem has been that we really only have a few …
My latest column for Freelance, the newsletter of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild… *** In his novel Time Enough for Love, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein included a number of aphorisms supposedly taken from the notebooks of his centuries-old central character, Lazarus Long. One of these I have ever since taken a kind of mischievous …
