Well, it is. Tomorrow, there’s even supposed to be snow again. On Maundy Thursday.
If you’ve been hanging around this or my other blogs, you may have noticed a few changes. First of all, my posts now have a “Like” button, where you can “like” posts right here on the site rather than at Facebook. There’s also a “Send to Kindle” button under every post, which allows you to send a longer post straight to your Kindle to read at your leisure. Since I don’t have a Kindle, I can’t test it (and there is no equivalent “Send to Kobo” button), but I hope it works.
Talking of my other blogs, over at the ABC Buhlert blog, I have a new post about the problem of anti-windpower prejudice.
Swan Tower a.k.a. Marie Brennan provides another contribution to the ongoing discussion on grimdark fantasy and states that there are actually three different though intertwined discussions going on here, namely whether gritty “realism” is superior to non-gritty and supposedly less realistic works, whether gritty and dark automatically equals grimdark and how one can portray the uglier sides of reality and history without sliding into reflexive racism and misogyny.
At the Irish Times, Gareth L. Powell theorizes about the future of science fiction, which is according to him lies in crossgenre hybrid works. Found via SF Signal. What I find particularly interesting about this article is that many of the authors and works mentioned happen to be published by Angry Robot.
The Atlantic offers an appreciation of Cordwainer Smith who would have been 100 this year. I particularly found the potential link between Cordwiner Smith and the psychoanalyst’s patient who believed he was an alien fascinating.
Slate has a fascinating article about Lew Wallace, a formar Civil War general who is nowadays best remembered as the author of Ben Hur. I read Ben Hur way back when I was doing a class on historical fiction of the 19th century (and have actually seen the silent film version rather than the Charlton Heston version which is a TV staple on the Easter weekend – The silent Ben Hur is marvelous BTW. Erté costumes and early colour!), but I didn’t know about the author’s background in the US Civil War.
Juliette Wade talks about neologisms in SF at Jamie Todd Rubin’s blog. I once wrote a linguistic paper about the same subject. Only in German alas.
Talking of linguistics and speculative fiction, Kate Elliott has an extensive post about developing a creole for Cold Fire at her blog.
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