Robert Day’s Reviews > Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy > Status Update

Right pages of bumph!

Stanley Schmidt again telling us why he rejects manuscripts. Sigh. So that's the end of the proper articles; the rest of it is bumph.

Asimov's guidance for new writers: read a lot, write a lot and have a thick skin.

Asimov avows that there is no real difference between writing for adults and writing for juveniles. So long as you write clearly, all is well.

Asimov didn't edit or revise his document much, Robert Heinlein not at all and the advice is: suit yourself.

Advice in how to submit a manuscript. The Two spelling mistakes in this book make the advice on spell-checking seem rather ironic.

Chapter where Stanley Schmidt whinges on about stories that that have been done to death. The irony is that he's already said all this in a previous chapter in this book. Good job he's entertaining.

Norman Spinrad is, in my opinion, a frickin' genius. His explanation of how to write far future dialogue borders on transcending this spacetime realm and voyage to a time and place where (when) the ... (I'm envisioning it but have no words for it). The trick, he says, to putting words into the mouths of people that are as far ahead of us as we are of the ancients is to mash up all the languages into one sprachlingo.

Fascinating account by Hal Clement of how to build an imaginary being for the purpose of a science fiction story. He really gets into the detail here and gives do many helpful points that it's hard to imagine that building a new creature isn't as easy as baking a pie.

In which Poul Anderson gives an erudite if a rather dry run-through of the science behind extrapolating the various aspects of the orbit/weather etc. of a fictional planet from what we knew in 1974 about Earth, Sol and other bodies in the universe. Interesting, but not something I'd want to do myself. I guess I'm more part of the 'say something vague and unprovable about the planet then get on with the story' school.