A speculative mind

William Shakespeare is generally regarded as one of the most, if not the most influential wordsmiths in the English Language. And I am not even going to get into the argument about who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems. For the purposes of this article whenever I say Shakespeare I mean whoever Wrote Shakespeare’s stuff regardless of whether it was Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, or Queen Elizabeth. (Though I will say, it is awfully easy to come up with a conspiracy theory 400 years after the fact when 90% of the evidence that would have shed light on it has been lost. How come no one was questioning the authorship 400 years ago? But I digress . . .) Why does Shakespeare still have such a powerful influence on us 400 years later? Why are we still making movies out of his plays? Some movies follow Shakespeare’s script fairly faithfully, while others are complete re-imaginings that are only loosely based on his plot, like the 1956 Sci-fi classic Forbidd...

Being a guy, I have sometimes fallen prey to my guyness. I would like to think that I have always been a progressive thinker, always supported civil rights for all, equal pay, equal opportunities etc. And yet I must admit that when I was younger I did carry a bias against reading women science fiction writers. I mean, I was a guy. I was into guy things. I don’t think I even knew I had this bias at the time. I just never seemed to pick up anything written by women. I also don’t think I was alone in this. I think it was (and is?) common for young men to gravitate only to male writers. I don’t think the converse is necessarily true. I don’t think young women only try to read female writers, though never having been a young woman, I can’t say for sure. I guess some chinks started to appear in my male bias armor when my roommate convinced me to read Ursula K. Le Guin. There was a PBS dramatization of The Lathe of Heaven , which I really liked (the one with Bruce Davidson from the horr...

Last week I said I would give a preview of my upcoming novel Starliner. So that’s what this blog is today. The challenge is to do so in a way that is spoiler free. You don’t have to go terribly far into the novel before you start to hit some plot points that I can’t talk about without giving out spoilers. Oh well, here goes: Starliner is a science fiction novel set several hundred years in the future. The main character, Jan Stot, is a young man who has graduated from a performing arts college on his home planet of Flose. But Jan finds that getting a job in the entertainment industry is nearly impossible. On a lark, he applies for a job as an entertainer on a star liner that is making runs to the new colony world of Asbos. He is offered the job, but is somewhat daunted by the fact that it is a six month round trip. Still, he needs something to put on his resume, and he has never been off planet before, so he takes the job. On board the ship, he meets the other four entertai...

As far back as I can remember I have always been a fan of science fiction. As a kid I liked to watch those “weirdo shows”, as my mother used to call them: the Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Outer Limits etc. Naturally when I grew up enough to start reading real novels, I gravitated toward science fiction. A few years ago I posted to Facebook the list of my top 100 science fiction novels of all time. This was of course just my opinion as all art is entirely subjective. If you asked for the list from 1000 science fiction fans, you would get 1000 different lists. This is as it should be. We all have different tastes. I did not make any claim that these were the absolute best 100 sci-fi novels, just that they were my top 100 favorites. Nonetheless, it was somewhat controversial. People disagreed with me (it seems odd that people could disagree with what my favorite books were). Some people were objecting to some of the authors who had some personal failing. This is an interesting poi...