Caryn James, who I gather is a movie critic for The New York Times, recently compared and contrasted the current film The Children of Men with the P.D. James novel of the same title that the movie was based on.

Doing so, of course, required her to state, in her second paragraph, that The Children of Men "is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction." Sadly, the person being sloppy here is Ms. James. The Children of Men is a near-future thriller about a devastating change in society and the repercussions it causes: that is precisely what science fiction is and does. The book is and was SF, and so is the movie.

The Children of Men is not genre science fiction -- that is, it was not written and published as part of the self-identified publishing category called "science fiction" -- but it depends on second-hand ideas about science, society, progress and the future that came from SF and its subject is ineluctably SFnal. James's ignorance of SF in 1992 -- and the possibly even deeper ignorance of Ms. James today -- cannot change The Children of Men into anything other than a SF novel, no matter who denies it.

First Dave Itzkoff, now this: is the Times entirely devoted to hiring the incompetent?

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Nothing has really happened yet -- it's just been lawyers sending pieces of paper back and forth -- but, for those who are interested in lawyer's pieces of paper, here are the ones in play.

Ellison's original complaint.

Fantagraphics's reply to the complaint. 

Fantagraphics's motion to dismiss.

Ellison's reply to that motion.

Fantagraphics's reply to the reply.

I don't think any of that is actually news, but this case may turn into news (if and when a hearing is scheduled) at some point. All of those links, by the way, are to PDFs, and some of them are large.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogcritics reviews Morbid Cravings by Gladys Furphy and Jessica James.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist joins the hordes praising Peter Watts's Blindsight.

New reviews from SFF World:

• this one for Pat Catlett's The Wolf and the Worm
• this one for Ilario: The Lion's Eye by Mary Gentle
• this one for Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu
• and this one for a book every fantasy reader needs to own, the indispensible The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones.
  

New Reviews from Fantasybookspot:

• this one for Charlie Huston's No Dominion
• this one for Andre Norton's YA classic Lavender-Green Magic
• and this one for Raising the Past by Jeremy Robinson.

BookFetish cracks its whip in the general direction of Laurell K. Hamilton's collection Strange Candy.

It's not exactly a "review," precisely, but Harold Bloom's appreciation of John Crowley's fantasy masterwork Little, Big (from The Book That Changed My Life) has been posted at Powell's Book Blog.

Maureen McHugh thinks about the Julie Phillips biogrpahy James Tiptree, Jr.

Blogcritics reviews Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends.

Midori Snyder reviews Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel at Endicott Redux.

Niall Harrison reviews more Salon Fantastique stories:

• "Dust Devil on a Quiet Street"
• "A Gray and Soundless Tide"
• and "Yours, Etc." 

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist picks the best of 2006, and names R. Scott Bakker's The Thousandfold Thought as best novel.

Bookgasm also lists the best of 2006, and likes The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont best of all. (Bookgasm's remit covers mysteries and thrillers as well as SF/Fantasy/Horror; but they also had a list of the "5 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2006" -- that sci-fi word again! it burns us! -- with Ian McDonald's Hugo-nominated River of Gods in first place.)

Bookgasm also also had a year-end round-up by their reviewer Mark Rose, who listed five books as the best he reviewed in 2006 (including Her Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, Farthing by Jo Walton, and Eifelheim by Michael Flynn.)

 Abigail Nussbaum lists her favorite books of 2006.

Niall Harrison urges all BSFA members to nominate for their annual awards, and provides some suggestions.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sci Fi Wire talks to Drew C. Bowling, the young author of The Tower of Shadows.

Space Archaeology interviews Thomas Harlan. [via SF Signal]

The UK SF Book Network interviews Jonathan Strahan, editor of the Best Short Novels series (among many other things -- the interview is mostly about his work on The Jack Vance Treasury).

Vera Nazarian talks to Joshua Palmatier, author of The Cracked Throne. 

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist points me to an interview (originally in French, but now translated) with Brandon Sanderson (author of Mistborn: The Final Empire).

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kim Harrison has written "'Twas the Night of the Solstice" for the Eos blog.

Susan Palwick has been posting sonnets on her blog recently, about hospitals and chaplaincy.

Tom Disch has been writing a lot of poetry on his LiveJournal, but I don't recall anything particularly festive.

Update: More! More! More!

Lynn Flewelling on Christmas in SoCal.

Jennifer Fallon's version of "'Twas the night before Christmas"

Endicott Redux's "Sunday Poem" has a Christmas connection this week. 

Update 2:

Alma Alexander provides yet another rewrite of the Clement Moore favorite, this time with a cat theme. (I'm not knocking the idea of fitting "'Twas the Night..." with new words; when my second son was born December 27 of 2000 I wrote a pretty bad version myself.)

Sherwood Smith posts a G.K. Chesterton Xmas poem. 

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 08:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few links before this blog goes darrk for the holidays, below. (See you on the other side...)

The second issue of Rudy Rucker's webzine Flurb is now available. [via BoingBoing, so you probably all know this already]

Hey, it's not just me! Galley Cat thinks the designated SF reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, Dave Itzkoff, is, to put it gently, "flawed." 

Reviews:

• The Flint Journal liked John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, even the fart jokes.
• Locus Online has posted the latest "Yesterday's Tomorrows" column by Graham Sleight, which reviews old SFF works.
• Niall Harrison continues reviewing Salon Fantastique story-by-story with an entry on "The Guardian of the Egg."
• Marianne Plumridge reviews a different anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Green Man.
• Marianne Plumridge also reviews Jess Nevins's The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. 
  

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Neth Space reviews Richard Bowes's From the Files of the Time Rangers.

Dave Itzkoff reviews John Scalzi's The Android's Dream in The New York Times Book Review, and ends up mostly talking about how fascist Robert A. Heinlein is.

 Bookgasm reviews Blood Lines, a book about Richard Matheson's Dracula script edited by Mark Dawidziak.

Rich Horton did a quick overview of the past year at Realms of Fantasy magazine.

Blogcritics reviews the audiobook version of Dean Koontz's Brother Odd.

Blogcritics also reviews Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel (not up on the SFBC site yet, but it will be soon).

Niall Harrison continues reviewing the Ellen Datlow-Terri Windling anthology Salon Fantastique at Torque Control: "My Travels with Al-Quaeda," "Concealment Shoes," "Femaville 29," and "The Lepidopterist."

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Locus is mailing its January issue to subscribers right now, so they've put up their usual page detailing its contents.

Aeon Speculative Fiction has a preview of its new Issue Nine available online. [via Locus Online]

Rain Taxi's Winter 2006/2007 issue has started appearing online (more is promised), featuring interviews with Neil Gaiman and Clare Dudman and many, mostly non-SFF, reviews. [also via Locus Online]

Fantasy Magazine now has a website.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry about the lack of posts yesterday; I was beginning my vacation by running around shopping most of the day. I imagine blogging will be slower than usual this week, but I will try to do some big round-ups every couple of days.

Speaking of which, let's get started with some interviews:

• The Business Standard (of India) interviews teenage SF authors Suresh & Jyoti Guptara, about their novel Conspiracy of Calaspia.
• Sci Fi Wire talked to Naomi Novik about the fourth book in the "Temeraire" series -- currently titled A Brazen Armament, though that will be changed before publication, so don't bother writing it down -- which will take Temeraire and Will to Africa. (By the way, you can still get the first three books in the spiffy SFBC omnibus edition.)
• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist interviews Peter Watts, author of Blindsight.
• Irene Gallo has a quick interview with artist Eric Fortune, and an accompanying gallery of his work. 
• The Agony Column interviews Anne & Todd McCaffrey about their recent novel Dragonsblood.
• Adventures in SciFi Publishing's second special edition podcast features a round-table discussion among David Farland, Brandon Sanderson, and L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
  

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Louis Edelman explains, in two detailed parts, how he got published.

Jennifer Fallon provides a cheat sheet of how fast one's characters can travel 100 miles, given different kinds of transportation. (She does omit the perennially popular "flying Eagles into Mordor," though.)

Kelly McCullough, at Wyrdsmiths, explains all of the reasons one might want to (or need to) use a pen name.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SF Site lists the new books that they've received recently.

Darren Turpin lists some recently-published books (in the UK) he particularly liked.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The nominations for the 2006 Aurealis Awards, for Australian imaginative writing in various categories, have just been announced.

Among the nominees for SF novel are Geodesica: Descent by Sean Williams with Shane Dix (available with its predecessor Geodesica: Ascent in the SFBC omnibus inevitably titled Geodesica).

Among the nominees for Fantasy novel is Sean Williams's wonderful Voidfarer, an amazing retelling of Wells's "War of the Worlds" in a fantasy millieu.

And among the Young Adult novel nominees is Justine Larbalestier's Magic Lessons, which will soon be available from the SFBC as the middle of the 3-in-1 The Magic of Reason.

I'm sure all of the other nominees are just as worthy as those that I've singled out -- and many of them have only been published in Australia, so they're a bit obscure to those of us on the other side of the world. But I bet they're all worth searching out.

The Awards will be presented January 27th, under the auspices of Fantastic Queensland, at a gala banquet at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts in Fortitude Valley (Queensland, of course). Good luck to all of the nominees.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

J.K. Rowling has announced on her web site that the seventh book in the series (which is slightly popular among some of the younger set) will be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

(I will be honest: this was reported by Publishers Weekly, which said that the news was originally on Rowling's site. Only...I can't seem to find it on that website. But I trust PW.)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sci Fi Wire talked to Jean Rabe about A Taste of Magic, the novel she co-wrote with the late Andre Norton.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ursula K. Le Guin has a major essay in New Statesman about the history and necessity of fantasy stories.

It's been said before, and it needs to be said regularly -- and Le Guin is one of our best at saying it so that people will listen.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Time Traveler Show has a new issue, #11, featuring the classic Philip K. Dick story "Beyond Lies the Wub."

Paul Levinson read the first chapter of his new novel The Plot Against Socrates for The Sound Palette. (Levinson also has a regular podcast, Light on Light Through.)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogcritics is over the moon about Von Neumann's War by John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor.

The LA Times looks at the recent spate of near-future right-wing thrillers.

Up Against the Wall reviews Dan Simmons's new novel The Terror. [via Locus Online]

BookFetish looks at The Frost-Haired Vixen by John Zakour.

Bookgasm loves Gene Wolfe's new novel Soldier of Sidon.

Niall Harrison (of Torque Control) is reading Salon Fantastique, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, and intends to do a blog post for every story. He starts out with one on Jeffrey Ford's "The Night Whiskey."

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogcritics interviews Neil Williamson about his first short-story collection The Ephemera.

Sci Fi Wire talks to James Gunn about his impending Grand Master-ship.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist chats with Brian Ruckley, author of Winterbirth.

Up Against the Wall talks to cover artist John Picacio. [via Locus Online]

Vera Nazarian talks to "Sophie Mouette" about her novel Cat Scratch Fever. (And I can't tell if that book has any SFF content, though I suspect it does.)

USA Today talks to Stephen King about the "Dark Tower" comics adaptations.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tobias Buckell is doing another one of his periodic "survey authors and crunch numbers" projects (he had one about first-novel advances last year), and this time he's asking novelists how many books they had written before their "first" (published) novel.

(Buckell, besides being a swell guy, an interesting blogger, and a relentlessly curious person, is also the author of the fine first novel Crystal Rain, which you should check out.)

Update: Buckell has posted the results of his survey, which indicates that most of these published novelists (150 people took the survey) wrote two or more novels before they sold one of them.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a new issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction, including an interview with Karin Lowachee, a look at paranormal romances, and a number of reviews. 

Strange Horizons's Monday regular update includes a story by Matthe Johnson, an article about Christmas, poetry, and reviews.

AntipodeanSF's issue #103 has been posted.

Niall Harrison has posted the Table of Contents for Vector #249 at Torque Control.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Green Man Review has had its usual bi-weekly update, including:

• this review of Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
• this review of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version
• a review of Terry Pratchett's newest novel, Wintersmith
• a review of Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel Ysabel (coming soon to the SFBC)
• and many more

Monsters and Critics reviews Katherine Kurtz's Childe Morgan.

Sci Fi Weekly reviews The Last Green Tree by Jim Grimsley.

Also at Sci Fi Weekly is this new review of Alastair Reynolds's Zima Blue and Other Stories.

Tangent Online has recently published reviewed a review of Asmov's February issue, a review of the collection Words of Birth and Death by Hannu Rajaniemi, and a review of the most recent issue of Ideomancer.

Blogcritics looks at The Sandman Papers, edited by Joe Sanders.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sci Fi Wire talked to Jim Grimsley about his new novel The Last Green Tree.

Matt Cheney interviews Bantam editor Juliet Ullman for Fantasy Magazine.

Velcro City Tourist Board interviews Karl Schroeder.

The Sunday Times talks to Terry Pratchett, mostly because of the major miniseries made from his novel Hogfather.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jed Hartman (one of the Strange Horizons editors) has had trouble -- as all of us do -- keeping track of the rapidly proliferating "Year's Best" collections. Unlike you and me, he did something about it -- putting up a website to track all of those collections, with as much pertinent information as is public.

It's designed to help editors of magazines and other venues know where and when to send materials, but I expect to make use of it as a bookclub editor, and I imagine some readers will find it useful as well.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Peter Watts has created an online PowerPoint presentation about the "vampires" (actually a reconsitituted hominid race) in his great novel Blindsight. The presentation is available for free on the web (as is, you might recall, the novel itself).

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year (and maybe in past years, too; I wasn't paying close attention), you can vote in the Asimov's Reader's Awards online -- so, if you've been reading Asimov's, go and vote for the stuff you liked.

[via Tim Pratt]

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I guess we're not quite done yet:

The San Francisco Chronicle calls Cormac McCarthy's The Road "the best book by far," but doesn't otherwise list any SFF titles.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

SF Site has not yet put out one of the ubiquitous "Best of the Year" lists (perhaps because they realize the year is not yet over), but they have just announced the opening of voting for their Reader's Choice Awards.

You can vote for up to ten books published in 2006...what are you waiting for?

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonathan Strahan celebrates the best books he read this year with the Coode Street Awards, including The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross as Best Novel (coming soon to the SFBC in a 2-in-1 with The Atrocity Archives).

Visions of Paradise gives a quick quide to the fiction (and importance) of Samuel R. Delany.

Holly Black has posted an excerpt from her upcoming novel Ironside.

Reviews:

• Desicritics covered Tanya Huff's A Confederation of Valor. (The same review is also available on Blogcritics.)
  
• SkullRing looks at the anthology Aegri Somnia, edited by Jason Sizemore.
• SF Signal reviews Jeff Patterson's Solstice Chronicles.
• Fantasybookspot has a review of Julio Romano's Escape from Innocence and a review of The Alien Mind by Virginia Lori Jennings.
• Bookgasm reviews Richard Matheson's The Twilight Zone Scripts, Volume Two.
• CA Reviews looks at the very game-based Witches' Forest by Mishio Fukazawa.
• Writing in The Weekend Australian, Terry Dowling reviews Margo Lanagan's Red Spikes. [via Jonathan Strahan]
  
• New SF Site Reviews:

1. this one for The Hickory Staff by Robert Scott and Jay Gordon
2. one here for Urban Fantastic by Allen Ashley
3. this one for Threshold Shift by Eric Brown
4. this one for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #17 edited by Stephen Jones
5. this one for Viriconium by M. John Harrison
6. this one for Robert A. Heinlein's classic juvenile novel Time for the Stars (available in the SFBC Omnibus Infinite Possibilities)
7. this one for To Be Continued, the first volume of a new series collecting the best short stories of Robert Silverberg
8. this one for Icarus by Roger Levy
9. this one for Lisa Tuttle's The Silver Bough
10. and this one for I Was Probed by Aliens and Lived to Tell the Tale by Barry J. House

Interviews:

• Pat's Fantasy Hotlist talks to Orson Scott Card, author of the new novel Empire.
• AustGate interviews M. John Harrison.
• SF Site has a chat with Scott Westerfeld.
  
• The Sci Phi Show interviews Paul Levinson.
• Dugald Steer talks about his book The Dragon's Eye on video at Meet the Author USA.
  

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last “Author’s Note” I have this month is from Melanie Rawn, from who we haven’t heard much the past few years. But she’s back now, with a contemporary fantasy named Spellbinder. Why contemporary fantasy? I’ll let her tell you:

Not what you were expecting, right? Magic present and accounted for. But — New York? Witches, Satanists, a U.S. Marshal, a biographer/novelist — and Bonnie Raitt songs? Is this really a Melanie Rawn book? Trust me: it really is a Melanie Rawn book. I know this because I'm Melanie Rawn, and I wrote it. While writing it, I discovered that I like playing in the world I actually live in, as opposed to playing in the worlds I live in inside my head. I like being able to reference people, politics, religion, history, world events — and Bonnie Raitt songs. Which is not to say I won't play in my other worlds again. But until I do, I hope you have a good time with Spellbinder.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our third Selection this month is a debut fantasy novel, Scar Night, by Alan Campbell, who has an interesting past and who maintains a blog, An Urban Fantasy. Speaking of urban fantasy, Alan, what is it, exactly?

Someone recently asked me to explain exactly what urban fantasy was. Because genre boundaries are porous and always seem to be shifting, I couldn't think of a quick and easy answer to the question. Contemporary fantasy? Fantasy set in an urban environment? Did it necessarily have to be dark or gritty? While some of the definitions appeared to be reasonably apt, at least with regards to what I was writing, none of them really nailed down this sub-genre for me. My dictionary had never managed to shed much light on the subject either, so I mulled the question over for a while, before settling on "the sort of fantasy which wouldn't be invited to the Queen's Ball." I don't mean to imply that the setting or characters have to be scruffy. But I'd like to think that if high fantasy asked you to embark upon a quest to find a magic stone, then urban fantasy would be waiting in the shadows, ready to mug you when you got back.

And now you get two notes for the price of one, both about Maelstrom by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.

First, here’s Anne McCaffrey:

Annie and I go back several decades now as collaborators.  We met in Kansas City (her home town) when I was on a signing tour and, serendipitously, on the same day she found out that her first book on her infamous hearth witch, Maggie Brown, had been accepted.  Well, it was incumbent on me to take this newbie out for a decent meal, and that began a friendship, solidified by the fact that we are both kat staff and have many yarns to exchange.

Then, when she was in Europe doing research, Annie stopped off to visit me.  Well, for one thing, you can't have two authors at the same table without a lot of “what-ifs” in the air, and we agreed that there had been very few books done on ice-worlds...and since we both knew “inconvenient peoples”...the Inuits for Annie and the Travellers for me in Ireland, we decided they'd be the scapegoats. Then the planet which we named Petaybee (for the Powers that Be) wanted to know if it could have a say in the matter.  We diplomatically agreed as any sensible pair of writers would.  Annie and I share the same sort  of humor and so shared the disk which contained the meat of Petaybee while we worked on our other on-going novels.  It was a lot of fun matching wits, sharing jokes and creating an ice world.

I'm delighted to know that Maelstrom has been put at such a prestigious level.  Just goes to show you that two minds are better than one.

And here’s Elizabeth Ann Scarborough with her take on their collaboration:

I like Sky the otter best and working with the animal characters. He and the other animal characters, to me, personify Petaybee, in the same way that the stories of indigenous people that feature “talking” animal characters show their close personal relationship with the earth. The twins, kids on the land, seals in the sea, are like the planet’s liaison between humans and animals, even more than their father, whose human side is more fully developed. For contrast, I enjoy writing Yana’s viewpoint as “the little human” in her family coupled with her somewhat military style of mothering. It’s odd how hard it can be at times to imagine people who care intensely about their world and a world that cares intensely about its people, but this world is an echo of earth as some stories say it used to be, contrasted with a contemporary resource gobbling human universe surrounding it. And then there are those aliens. . .

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since another cycle is in the mail (see my post yesterday for the full line-up of new books in Winter), it's time to break out the "Author's Notes" that some of the writers featured there were kind enough to write for us.

First up is Orson Scott Card, writing about his new novel Empire:

I try to be honest with my readers — apart from the fact that you know I make all this stuff up — so I must inform you now: Empire is being offered to the Science Fiction Book Club under false pretenses.  Because, while I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever written, it’s ... shhhh ... don’t tell ... not sci-fi.

OK, there are futuristic weapons.  But they’re not that far from buildable.  And since it’s a thriller set in a year meant to be just like 2008, by the time the paperback edition comes out, this book won’t even be in the future.

When I write science fiction — like my Homecoming books, set 30 million years in the future — I don’t have to do any research.  Because who’s going to tell me that I’m wrong about how things will be that long from now?

And even with historical books, like my Women of Genesis, I’m working in such a murky area of history that there are lots of scholars with opinions, but none who can prove that my speculations are flat wrong.

But Empire is different.  I’m using soldiers who would already be in the service right now.  Politicians who would already be in office.  I have to show government and the military and the daily life of these people exactly as they would be if this story took place in 2008 in known cities in the real world.

You know what that means?  Yes.  It means I actually had to work.  I couldn’t just make up a name for the veeblefritzer personal foe-blaster, I had to find out what weapons real soldiers carry, how they use them, and what they call them.  And I’ve never been in the military.

I also don’t care about cars.  I don’t know many people who do.  So what would it mean if somebody drives, say, an SUV rather than a Mustang or Thunderbird or Honda?  (Here’s my secret: They use a lot of black SUVs on 24, so I figured I was OK with using them too.)

Worst of all, I actually had to come up with a terrorist plot to kill the President that my readers would believe might really work.

Think about that.  I’m a regular, nonviolent guy.  I have nothing against this president.  Even presidents I’ve detested over the years, I didn’t want dead.  And I had to drive around Washington DC trying to think of ways to get past the security and blow up the President, the Vice-president, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I could have been arrested just for what I was thinking.

Near-future thrillers are just too hard.  I’m too old and lazy.  Next time, I’m back to sci-fi.  No, wait.  Fantasy!  That’s what I’ll do!  No research at all!  Just — shazam!

No, wait.  The best fantasy writers are even making those realistic.  Don’t these writers realize that research is like homework?  Didn’t they get enough of that in school?

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)