Lou Anders's Blog, page 54

San Diego Comic Con 2010

Last week was the San Diego Comic Con. I was there Thursday to Sunday morning, and had what was probably my best Comic Con experience ever. The con seemed more relaxed than previous, and less crowded (which might have been more to do with better crowd management than in previous years.) There did seem to be less costumes on the floor, and what there was seemed to emphasize classic characters over the latest films (Iron Man excepted, but a surprising lack of Na'vi). Generally, I just had an im...

Marjorie M Liu on MASKED in the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy

New York Times bestselling author, and MASKED contributor, Marjorie M. Liu, is interviewed in the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog today on all things superhero.

Here's a taste, where she talks about the genesis of her story, "Call Her Savage": "I found myself lodged between a semi and a jeep—without even the promise of inching forward—and three words popped into my head: CALL HER SAVAGE. Which, as you can guess, pretty much summed up my emotions at the time," Liu said. "I knew then that i...

SF Signal's MIND MELD: What 'Sword and Sorcery' Means to Me

Art by Benjamin CarreThe latest SF Signal Mind Meld is up, and this one asks the question, "How do you define the sub-genre of 'Swords and Sorcery'?" For answers, they turn to the contributors (and co-editors) of my recent anthology, Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery . Answers come from such luminaries as Michael Morcock, Joe Abercrombie, Garth Nix (whose answer takes the form of a poem!), CJ Cherryh, Glen Cook, Bill Willingham, JK Parker, Tanith Lee, Tim Lebbon, James Enge, Scott L...

MASKED on largehearted boy

Today is Masked official publication day, and to celebrate we've worked up a special post made available through the kindness and generosity of music, literature and pop culture blog, largehearted boy. In what I'm sure you will admit is a rather unique way to talk about an anthology, largehearted boy invited yours truly and each of the anthology's contributors to write a short piece selecting a song and explaining that song's relationship to their own story (or in my case, the anthology as a ...

The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

I just got my contributor's copy of Philip Athans' The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction: 6 Steps to Writing and Publishing Your Bestseller! . The book has an introduction and original story by R.A. Salvatore, and features quotes from a number of SF&F luminaries, including Kevin J. Anderson, Terry Brooks, Paul Park, Mike Resnick, Yours Truly and others. I hope to get a chance to read it myself!

MASKED is here!

Masked is here!!!

The book is available for order on Amazon, B&N, BooksAMillion, IndieBound, and  (though still listed as a preorder) on Borders. It will be available in ebook edition as well, presumably on its official release date of July 20th. (The Kindle version keeps  unlinking itself from the physical book, but here it is).

io9's Charlie Jane Anders said of Masked, "The good thing about Masked, then, is that Anders gets stories from people who have a lot of experience with superheroes, o...

Enge is Freaking Terrific!

[image error] Steve at Elitist Book Reviews has just posted a review of my Eos anthology, Swords & Dark Magic (co-edited with Jonathan Strahan). The Pyr editor in me is particularly pleased with his assessment of James Enge's "The Singing Spear":

One of the best stories in the collection. Enge is so absurdly underrated. His character Morlock Ambrosius is a man of legend. A sorcerer of unparalleled power. And, uh, a complete drunk. "The Singing Spear" is a tale about what Morlock does when his...

Robert Silverberg on "Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?"

[image error] Science Fiction Grandmaster Robert Silverberg (whose Star of Gypsies and Son of Man we reprinted), at the Black Gate blog:

"Now we are back to the same situation that obtained in the golden era of the Fifties — s-f is mainly a field for hobbyist writers, with just a few able to earn a living writing just the real stuff and nothing but. (It is different, of course, for those who write pseudo-Tolkien trilogies, vampire novels, zombie books, and other sorts of highly commercial fantasy.) For a wh...

Babel Clash: The Babel is Blowing My Mind, Man!

The current discussion on Borders Books' Babel Clash blog between The Silver Skull author Mark Chadbourn and the Quantum Gravity series author Justina Robson has been just amazing. Some highlights:

"But there is a feeling that some writers lose sight of the ones they're writing for. Fandom is hugely developed nowadays, a way of life with everyone linked by the net and navel-gazing, dissection and comment taken to the ultimate degree. It's easy to get enveloped by the bubble and write books for...

io9 says "This book could teach Hollywood to do superheroes right"

May the dark gods of media bless io9. Charlie Jane Anders (no relation I'm aware of, but very nice) has written a review of Masked , my forthcoming anthology of superhero prose fiction, entitled "This book could teach Hollywood to do superheroes right."

"Masked, edited by Lou Anders, is a really strong collection of stories that play with the idea of superheroes in clever, often fascinating ways. There's a fair bit of metafictional commentary on the tropes of superhero stories, like costumes an...