B. Morris Allen's Blog, page 20

Slick

This blog post first appeared at Amazing Stories

Omni was a rare thing in the late 70s - maybe unique. It wanted to be a serious science and science fiction magazine, and it had the means to do it. It was staffed (and soon fronted) by Ben Bova, who had edited Analog after John Campbell. And it had the financial backing of Bob
Guccione of Penthouse fame.

Omni wanted to be mainstream. It had a large format, glossy covers, slick paper, and fancy layouts. It had serious popular science article...

Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed

This blog post first appeared at Amazing Stories

When we moved to London in the late 70s, there were bookstores galore. I started at Foyle's, the famous bookshop at Charing Cross Road. It was huge, disorganized, and jam-packed with books. Their SFF collection, though, was mixed. I quickly learned to go instead to two nearby shops. To the west a block or so was the store with a name that is my mother's favorite to this day, "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed", after a Ray Bradbury story. One...

Pulp

This blog post first appeared at Amazing Stories

I learned a lot about pulp magazines from the early Asimov. To be precise, from The Early Asimov . I'd encountered a few samples of pulp a little earlier, through the mysterious Ms X, as detailed here, and they were magical. But it was Asimov who put it all in context. I got Volume 1 of his collection from a friend, who stole it from a little shop off Vienna's Kaertner Strasse. I still feel guilty about it, though I didn't know until later, a...

So, what's SF for, anyway?

The most important thing science fiction does is give us a way to answer the 'what if?' question that many writers of the Golden Age talked about. That might be Heinlein's 'If this Goes On', or it might be something much more far-fetched. But what I think really covers the ground is the more current term 'speculative fiction'.



Sure, every piece of fiction can be deemed speculative in one sense or other. But for science fiction, speculation is the main reason for being. Some of it is simple...

Master Classics

Somewhat by chance, I've been reading three classic works by three SFF masters at the same time. Not just classics, in fact, but possibly the three most popular works by these authors (which is not to say their best). I started with Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy, added Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, and finally Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Also Gabriel García Márquez' La Hojarasca (The Leaf Storm), though I'm not sure that fits in. I usually read different books
in differ...

It's Amazing!

I've started blogging at the revived Amazing Stories. Yes, that same Amazing that Hugo Gernsback started way back when, the Amazing that published Isaac Asimov's first story. True, there have been a few changes of ownership since then, the occasional hiatus, a different format or two... But still Amazing. For the moment, it's a magazine focused on science fiction fans and blogs.

Readers of this blog may find my initial post familiar - it's a reprint of a post I published here, about the mys...

A bad year for good writers

Jack Vance has died. Following close on the heels of Iain Banks' announcement, it's starting to seem a gloomy year for science fiction fans. Of course, unlike with Banks, few could say that Vance didn't have a full run. He'd died at the age of 96, after a long, full life that saw his skills recognized (even if he downplayed them).




Regular readers of this blog know that I consider Jack Vance one of the greatest things ever to happen to science fiction, or to literature in general. I like hi...

Tocsin

The new issue of Penumbra is out - with a flash piece by yours truly, and other stories about oceans.http://ow.ly/kBYFj

Suggested reading: Richard Adams

Most people know of Richard Adams as the author of Watership Down - you know, the one with the talking rabbits that seemed to spark a craze of talking animal books. More recently, he published Traveller - the story of a US Civil War horse. In between, though, he did a whole lot more, including some without any talking animals at all.




Adams has long been a favorite author. I came to him via the excellent Watership Down, as most probably did. But he came to mind recently when I was on Goodr...

The Amazon monolith

This morning, I got an e-mail from Goodreads announcing their sale to Amazon. By the time (moments later) I reached the Goodreads blog, there were already a thousand comments. People have a lot to say, but for the most part, they're divided. So am I.

I found Goodreads through fellow writer Fran Wilde. I tested it out, and found it had a lot of things I'd been looking for as a reader, and a few things I hadn't known I was looking for as a writer. Since then, I've been steadfastly posting rev...