Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 46
June 25, 2020
Discovery…
In my novel Son of Thunder, the second book in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, a lifetime of discovery was employed. I like that term instead of research, which is used incorrectly by many authors. The historical data is already out there, even though historians hardly do research to find it either. Writers, especially authors of historical fiction, like to say they had to do a lot of “research” for their novels. Nope. They do a lot of discovery of what’s out there.
Maybe I make to...
June 24, 2020
Book Review of Hegarty’s Story of Ireland…
The Story of Ireland. Neil Hegarty, author (Thomas Dunne, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press). Ireland has an extensive literary tradition. On the bio page of my website, the second photo shows me at the Dublin Writers Museum. It’s a bit small and stodgy, but I enjoyed going there to read about the Emerald Isle’s famous writers. Who hasn’t read Swift, Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, and the other Irish greats? Just from that sample, you’d think there’d be more good histories of Ireland written. ...
June 23, 2020
Op-Ed Pages #7: Culture…
The US is huge and probably has the most diverse population among all industrialized nations. We should all understand and embrace the different currents and eddies coursing through the American cultural ocean, but they’re just that, parts of an American cultural experience. “Black culture,” “Irish culture,” “Italian culture,” “Jewish culture,” and many others belong to the past and are part of American culture now. To dwell on these ingredients thrown into our grand melting pot is to live in a ...
June 18, 2020
Publishing delays…
The most glaring difference between traditional and self-publishing resides in the delays ubiquitous in the former. As a mongrel (both a traditionally and self-published author), I have the experience to support my opinion: Traditional publishing is painfully slow! Some might argue with me (especially the publishers!), countering with something like, “Well, Steve, there are a lot of books, and each author’s work goes into a long queue.” Yes, that’s true. But if a self-published author isn’t 100%...
June 17, 2020
Speculative Fiction #3: Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy…
While Margaret Atwood would lump both of these genres under her catch-all category “Speculative Fiction,” they’re really very different, even though a bookstore might ignorantly shelve them in the same section. Sci-fi peers into the realm of the possible and is often an extrapolation of current science and technology; fantasy peers into the realm of magic and the impossible and generally ignores all science and technology. Many scientists read sci-fi but eschew fantasy; many authors who are ex-s...
June 16, 2020
Op-Ed Pages #6: COVID Notes…
Trump’s administration is the worst in American history…and like all fascist-inspired executive institutions, it is also incompetent and perfidious. The NY Times seems to have problems calling Trump and his administration fascist; I’ve been doing so since the 2016 campaign. I guess people like Robert Reich have finally decided that word describes Trump. I suppose I should feel vindicated.
Allow me to ignore the many tweets from this narcissistic ignoramus where he displays autocratic behavior an...
June 11, 2020
Speculative Fiction #2: Horror…
To show how illogical book taxonomy is, horror is often considered part of speculative fiction. Most of it isn’t sci-fi, which I think Ms. Atwood equates to speculative fiction in her mind, so there is a question of how to classify it. And it often has a lot in common with fantasy, but even non-fiction can contain a lot of horror. We often think of Stephen King as the horror-master, but Misery is a fairly standard thriller, albeit containing a lot of horror…especially for authors! And is it alwa...
June 10, 2020
Speculative Fiction #1: General Comments…
Margaret Atwood likes to use “speculative fiction” as a catch-all category for her work and others’, everything from paranormal stories to hard sci-fi. Somewhere in that broad category you’ll find fantasy too. I prefer to be a bit more refined in my taxonomy—that’s “refined” in the sense of a more precise categorization of what a story is about. There’s nothing refined about a zombie in the sense of “refined gentleman”! Speculative fiction is just too general. Apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dyst...
June 9, 2020
Op-Ed Pages #5: “We don’t want no more police!”
[Note from Steve: Everyone seems to be addicted to knee-jerk reactions these days. Here’s mine, although it’s a call for sanity.]
I hope sanity prevails, but the subtitle here is a statement made by a protester in Minneapolis; it indicates temporary insanity, at the very least. “Defund the Police” is the new mantra, although its real meaning is often unclear. When the mayor of Minneapolis was asked if he would end the the MPD, yes or no, his answer was the only sane one: “No!” The protesters the...
Op-Ed Pages #4: An insidious push toward viral euthanasia?
The lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic are many. Unfortunately some are about scurrilous human behavior. As much as we say “Be smart…stay apart” and “Don’t be an ass…wear a mask,” there are knuckleheads and jerks who can’t seem to follow that advice, creating danger for others as well as themselves. One young man in California stated, “It’s so good to see people out here [on the beach] breaking quarantine.” It seems partying is more important than keeping people alive for some.
The most ...
