Simply Strange

Discovery looks good to come home. It docked at the ISS today after performing an unprecedented backflip to allow the astronauts on the station to photograph the shuttle's underside. This is great news.

A great article on Small Bear Press, founded by Kelly Link, one of my absolute favorite writers, and her husband, Gavin Grant. I especially liked this nugget that seems, finally, to identify for me in some way what I'm doing with my stories:

"This genre is not 'category' SF; it is not even 'genre' SF," wrote [Bruce] Sterling. "Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a 'sense of wonder' or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange, the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

And here's a great review of Kelly's new book, Magic For Beginners, which I'm reading next. It's from The Simon, which is suddenly my new favorite place on the web.

Paramount ran Star Trek into the ground, and Levar Burton is pissed!

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