Catch of the Day

"I began writing in order to arrive into the company of those whose company meant more to me than any other: the world of the books I’d found on shelves and begun to assemble on my own, and the people who’d written them, and the readers who cared as much as I did, if those existed."
—Jonathan Lethem

Catch of the Day

"Imagine the publishing world as it might look in a dystopian universe in the distant future. In this world, college English majors—call them 'Englies'—aspire to write only one kind of book: the dystopian young adult novel set in the distant future. (Englies of a certain status are permitted to write about dystopias populated by vampires.) Another subset of the population—'the Fans'—provides a kind of slave labor, posting endlessly to dedicated blogs and recording podcasts, providing free marketing for an unceasing succession of aspiring best-seller trilogies."
—From the children's book section of today's
New York Times Book Review

Catch of the Day

"When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, 'What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.' They want nothing to do with 'good writing.' These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they're willing to say, 'I'm sorry. That's not what we're interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.'

"This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It's not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we're talking about 'commercial' versus 'art' publishing, we're using a leftover vocabulary. We're still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses."

—Samuel R. Delany, Locus, March 2010

Catch of the Day

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."
—Dorothy Parker

Catch of the Day

"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible."
—Mark Twain

Catch of the Day

Quiet Earth ("dedicated to genre film and everything postapocalyptic") has posted this striking steampunk-inflected poster for director Joseph Kahn's effort at adapting Neuromancer to film (listed at IMDb as still in preproduction).

Cool-enough looking to give you hope . . .

Catch of the Day

There is unquestionably a connection for me between the maps I encountered as a young reader—the endpaper maps—and the maps I created for myself, both literally drew myself, of imaginary lands I was trying to bring into existence, and the internal maps I was creating of the world that I lived in, the world that I played in—the neighborhood. . . . Where the mean dogs were, where the mean dads were, where the bad kids hung out. All of that was intimately connected in my mind with what I was reading.

I don't think there's any question that kids aren't sent out to play with the same kind of freedom anymore, at least not where I live. I would say, "Bye, Mom," and I'd be gone all day long. It felt like such a porous boundary, between my physical world, in which I enacted my imaginary games, and the world I was reading about in the books I loved. They fed each other. What happens when you take out one huge part of that—what happens to kids' imaginations?

—Michael Chabon, from an interview in the Los Angeles Times

Catch of the Day

A person who has become interested in SF through the media, or because of vague childhood memories, will pick up a book from the vast SF rack and be turned off. He or she will be turned off because the work will almost certainly be crap. . . . Yup, you could read a good SF novel a week each week of the year, no doubt. But if you read an SF novel a week picked at random from the rack, you'd never come back for a second year of such torture.
—Robert J. Sawyer

[From Sawyer's “The Death of Science Fiction” (1991), an old piece given new life by recent citations in Bookmarks and Utne Reader. Via CJA at io9.]

Catch of the Day

I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate. I am often in reveries and brown studies. . . . We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune—in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.
—John Adams (1774)

Catch of the Day

Writing is mainly recreational. I'm not happy when I'm not doing it.
—Christopher Hitchens

Catch of the Day

In another world, the Hugos.

Catch of the Day

We're dusting off the flying motorcycles, man. We have some great ideas for those babies.
—Ron Moore

Catch of the Day

Paul Rudnick at the New Yorker shows us that the scrotum controversy is only the tip of the . . . here.

Laugh till your hyena hurts.

Catch of the Day

I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.

The Transcriptions Project at UC Santa Barbara has created an incredible archive dedicated to William Gibson's Agrippa, here. Oh, to possess a copy of the deluxe edition! I covet it with the same covetousness with which I covet one of Eleanor's.

Looks as if Spook Country is slated to hit the stands on August 7, by the way.

Catch of the Day

Speaking of Michael Chabon, I just happened upon the first chapter of his new short novel "Gentlemen of the Road," a swashbuckling adventure yarn that's being serialized in the New York Times Magazine, online here.

It's dedicated to Michael Moorcock. And it's chock full of pulpy goodness—Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories come to mind right off.

Take a look; you will be entertained.

Catch of the Day

Charlton Heston and a savagely coiffed vixen, wrapped in animal skins, riding horseback along a desolate seashore, confronted by the spike-crowned ruin of the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand: everyone knows how the world ends.
—Michael Chabon

Catch of the Day

In order to make things a little cleaner on the nobody-uses-thunder-but-Zeus front, I've changed the rent-a-clops' pistol from a standard revolver to a gyrojet.
—KDM