Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 171

Talking Head Dept.

Fellow author and industry colleague Andrew Conry-Murray has published an interview with yours truly. My favorite of my own lines:

I bump into plenty of folks who say they want to write SF or fantasy, but don’t seem to have any curiosity about the genres other than what they’ve already read in them, or seen on TV. If you don’t read outside your own genre, if you don’t read nonfiction, if you don’t read anything older than you are, if you don’t have an interest in current events outside of the...

A Peek Forward Dept.

Earlier this month I swung by one of the local used bookstores and snapped up Robert Silverberg's Hawksbill Station for cheap. SIlverberg is one of those SF authors who doesn't get much credit — he was more workmanlike and dependable than brilliant, and I kept getting him confused with that other Robert (Sheckley), whose acid humor set him a cut above the pack. But Silverberg was also quite good — The Man in the Maze, for instance, is a great little book, and Dying Inside is one of the few ti...

Now That I'm Enlightened I Expect To Be Just As Ignorant As Ever Dept.

High Fallutin' Nazis - NYTimes.com

[What Ken Langone, founder of The Home Depot, is raging against is] the idea that understanding economics, as opposed to other issues, might involve some kind of special expertise. This is an all too common problem with the wealthy, and maybe especially among self-made men: they think that their personal financial success means that they understand the economic system, and bristle at the notion that macroeconomics may be more than the sum of individual busine...

To Scratch One's Own Itch Dept.

I feel bad admitting to people that there was a time in my life when I stopped reading SF entirely for something like years on end, despite having been steeped in it as a kid. It's a little like confessing you haven't eaten in that restaurant since you got slightly sick in there ten years ago, despite them having changed the staff and remodeled the place.

I'm willing to accept some of this as a product of being attached to whatever it was I grew up with (Lem, Dick, Sturgeon, Asimov, Bradbury,...

Newly Minted Dept.

I'm now an actual, honest-to-goodness Goodreads author. Posts from my blog at GenjiPress.com will be syndicated here form now on.

Ain't it GRAND?

Reading Is Fun(damental) Dept.

I have the bad habit of seeking comfort where I know I shouldn't. Viz.: re-reading a book, or just dipping back into one I've read many times to read here and there, instead of starting a new one that I know will be worth the while. Life being unpredictably short, it does you no favors to cheat yourself out of the chance to experience something new. Ebert once called that sort of behavior a crime against one's curiosity, and how many criminals of that kind are minted every day?

Hence, I find,...

No Plan Ever Survives First Contact With The Enemy Dept.

Again, work and the busy-ness of settling in (finding a house, getting access to my stuff in storage) has intruded on blogging time. So, some Fold news, delivered with my customary lack of spoilers.

So far I'm about a third of the way through my first draft, with some major differences already having crept in between the plan I drew up and the book I'm delivering. They're less a matter of changing individual elements than altering how they're delivered in the story. I find time and again what...

The Rest Is Silence Dept.

This past week I learned of the death of one person,an Internet quasi-celebrity whose antics I'd followed for some time; and the impending death of another, a cult author whose work has existed in obscurity but thanks to the Internet has gained a bit more of a following. The first one died of an illness he knew as of over a decade ago would kill him eventually; the second had major cancer surgery not long ago, and appended "This is the last piece I will publish in my lifetime" to the most rec...

Liberation and Ecstasy (Vasilisk)

After Dead Can Dance burst onto the music scene in the early Eighties, with their mix of tribal, classical, and popular sounds, it was tempting to draw connections back to them from just about everyone else, no matter how remote, who seemed like they belonged on the same shelf. Vasilisk was, and is, one such unit, even if the group itself hailed from a completely different direction: they didn't have anywhere nearly the consistency of output of DCD, and consequently their work tended to be fa...

The Crack In Everything Dept.

One of the better pieces of creative advice I've received is "Look for the cracks in things." Leonard Cohen has a couplet along those lines: there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. Butthe right way to apply that advice eluded me for a long time.

A major element of Flight of the Vajrais the Old Way, a kind of techno-renunciationist spiritual movement of the far future. The people who follow it are not wholly against technology, but against specific things they feel degrade...