kdansky

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Commented on Time tourism
You should have at least mentioned Bloodline Feud, where the main character is a woman, who travels between worlds that are essentially in different time periods. I'm reading it right now in its new glory, and I'm having a blast....
Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
Glasshouse might fail in the US because of its very crass anti-Christian tone, where the church is just a meeting ground for abuse, the pastor is a dictator and the nod to the ultra-sexist 1950's society. All completely true, but...
Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
It makes complete sense to me that Accelerando took a long time to write. Of all the novels I've ever read, it's the most deserving of the label "Science Fiction", as it does start out very realistic, and while not...
Commented on Books I've written
I care more about the books that made a comment about our actual world, or at least tried to. While I enjoyed Fuller Memorandum and so on a lot, they are not particularly special, or I missed that. It's a...
Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
I'm pretty sure a story with "Münchhausen-Syndrome by Proxy" and cancer medication writes itself. Heaps of brutal side-effects for the whole family, especially if you don't get to take the pills that help prevent the side-effects....
Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the Author of Black Swan, not the thing with Natalie Portman, but the book about statistics) said it too: Ignore the News. It's just a long list of depressing things and ignores all the good things that...
Commented on A message from our UK sponsors
I don't mind the higher price, but I'm really not fond of hard-backs, especially the UK ones which are just over-sized paperbacks. When will we see a more carryable print?...
Commented on Why I don't self-publish
I recently stumbled over this: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521 He both self-published and wrote for O'Reilly, and was not amused. I wonder if non-fiction might be a different beast entirely: Because let's face it, your typical editor will have a very tough time...
Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
Side-story for covers: When you order older books through Amazon of which there are more than one cover variant available, you sometimes don't get the one you expected. I have a weird assortment of Charlie's books in US and UK...
Commented on Science & Technology, Working Together
I've always considered the first Jurassic Park to be a good novel, and all the people who have only seen the films have ridiculed me for it! I knew I was on the right track there! Quoting my Geographic teacher...
Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
I got rid of my landline phone because the only calls I got on it were telemarketers and my mother, whom I'm trying to teach to use Skype instead. My Internet is now via TV cable (which I also don't...

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paws4thot commented on Time tourism
Further on Octavia Butler - Growing older (look, growing "up" is not compulsory) near Glasgow in the 1970s and 80s, I honestly don't remember her books in the local SF shops. Of course, that may be at least partly down to that being when I was reading through all the "classic authors" and my Fantasy period....
tangurena commented on Time tourism
Accuracy in historical fiction is hard. Lindsey Davis tries very hard with her Falco series (he's a private investigator in Rome). Not SF at all. LD: I take pains with historical detail because otherwise, what's the point? But people get very pompous about all this. The Falco books were always intended to be light-hearted, almost spoofs. It's a joke to take a Forties-style gumshoe and put him two thousand years ago. And if I were to be really accurate linguistically I'd be writing in Latin – not even classical Latin but some street argot that we don't actually know. He...
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkiLXV2mDF_7okO8QkO9GOiH6RY-2VmIWY commented on Time tourism
What about E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet? That's a mixed group of Edwardian boys and girls who go time-traveling by means of a magic ankh. They go back to ancient Egypt and forward to a somewhat dystopian utopia. CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew has the same deal but with world hopping via magic rings, going to a mostly dead world then a world at its birth. Then Mary Norton's The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks--which Disney put together for Bedknobs and Broomsticks--has in the second book time travel back to the Great Fire of London. And while...
Bellinghman commented on Time tourism
Or to quote Charlie in the following article to this: It's also noteworthy that the "men time-travel; women stay at home" paradigm doesn't apply in childrens' literature, if the time traveler is a child. - perhaps that may be widened to say if any of the time travellers are children....
austern commented on Time tourism
The funny thing: I can think of lots of instances of time travel stories, some of which may be counterexamples to the original post (one of my favorite time travel stories that has a female time traveler and that's very specifically about mid-20th century gender roles, for example, is Ellen Klages's "Time Gypsy"), but I'm not actually sure I can think of any examples of time tourism. The title of this post feels perfectly reasonable, and it feels like it ought to be a really common trope, I'm just having trouble thinking of concrete examples. Well, not in grownup fiction,...

Responses to Comments from kdansky

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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