From the Podosphere: January ‘08

This month, From the Podosphere offers something other than the usual short story roundup: two audio dramas and one novella.
Podcast audio dramas, particularly genre work—which seems to be the majority of it—are like the bastard offspring of 50s and 60s radio serials, such as The Shadow and Sexton Blake, and audio space operas that were […]

Flickers on the Wall: Masters of Horror (Part 1)

There’s nothing equivalent to the fantastic fiction magazines of literature for film, nothing you can subscribe to in order to get the most exciting and skillfully conceived short movies (or poor ones that somehow got past the slush viewers) each month. There were no Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, or Worlds of IF to shepherd […]

Audiobook Fix: Wonder Audiobooks

Audible.com has recently added a bunch of short speculative fiction to its catalog. One of the more interesting new publishers there is Wonder Audiobooks, which produces unabridged versions of vintage genre fiction. Here are a few of the titles they offer:

“Fondly Fahrenheit” is Alfred Bester’s most famous short story, and it contains echoes […]

Distillations: Assonance

This month we continue our exploration of poetry techniques with assonance, defined as the repetition of vowel sounds. Last month, I referred to assonance as “alliteration’s crafty cousin.” The reason for this is that assonance is much less visually obvious. Although the English language is quite free with the correspondence of spelling to sound, this […]

The Day Job: Generating Hard Science Fiction Story Ideas Painlessly

Editors frequently bewail the paucity of hard science fiction stories, and many writers would love to be able to write them, but what, short of a doctorate in science or math, will give a budding science fiction writer the knowledge and background to write a hard science fiction story? Stan Schmidt, the editor of […]

From the Podosphere: December ‘07 podcasts

Greg Van Eekhout’s “In the Late December,” read by Stephen Eley, is a good old-fashioned, sense-of-wonder, weird SF tale with a modernist twist. It seems that we are close to the end of all life in the universe, no less. Santa and his reindeer are still alive, as are some “children” scattered across different […]

Post-Cyberpunk’s Moment in History: Remembering the 1990s

Post-cyberpunk was very much a fiction of the 1990s, sharing or reacting not only to the decade’s realities, but its expectations—many of them ludicrous in retrospect, and perhaps more than many would admit, obviously ludicrous at the time as well.
My recollection of these as I read the recent post-cyberpunk anthology, Rewired (reviewed here), is especially […]

Flickers on the Wall: A Dead Month

January is a dead month. Outside my window the trees are barren, except for a few Georgia pines, dreaming of better days, and the grass displays nothing but shades of brown. The sky is gray, and the only wildlife is a pair of feral cats who’ve decided my porch provides better protection from the […]

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers in Science Fiction

One of the most popular games in international relations has always been “Guess the Next Global Hegemon.” Naturally, the game seems to become most popular in the superpower of the day when a higher than average proportion of its people become convinced that there will be a Next Hegemon, after them—which is to say, […]

Distillations: Alliteration

As I mentioned last month, this column will be exploring various poetry techniques each month and how they are used in current speculative poetry. This month’s featured technique is alliteration, which is defined as the repetition of initial consonants or consonant sounds. It is a simple technique which can be powerful if not overdone. It […]