Welcome to Sci-Fi November

What a great idea: a month-long gathering of bloggers to blog about all things Sci-Fi. The organizers of the event are book bloggers at Oh, The Books! and Rinn Reads. Thank you, Rinn, Kelley, Asti, and Leanne for hosting this event and letting me take part in it.

About me and Sci-Fi
You can read more about me here. My relationship to Sci-Fi goes way back, maybe all the way to the first book I remember reading, “Bears on Wheels” (does that count as Sci-Fi? Or is it sci-fantasy? Where do anthropomorphized animals exist within genre classifications if not Sci-Fi?). This is just my way of saying that, like many people, I was invested and interested in science fiction long before I knew the genre was called that. I consumed books, movies and TV shows that all fit within the genre. But I have my limits. I’m a big fan of the original series of Star Trek, but for some reason have never been able to get into Dr. Who. I really enjoyed reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (as well as 2010), but Kubrick’s movie always seems slow when it gets to space and bloated in the final third. Some of my all-time favorite books are set in post-apocalyptic zones (such as A Canticle for Liebowitz and the MaddAddam trilogy), and yet I’ve had a hard time getting into many of the post-apocalyptic TV shows like Defiance, Falling Skies, Jericho, and even, yes, BSG (though Walking Dead works for me).

I’m also a writer, and my recent publications have been in the speculative fiction genre, including stories in the anthologies Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and Veterans of the Future Wars. I also have a day job, where I work in a very cool museum on a college campus in upstate New York.

What I’ll be doing this month
I plan on writing a handful of blog posts this month, including reviews of MaddAddam (thus completing a trilogy of reviews for the trilogy) and the movie Intersteller, and some posts that I hope will be provocative discussion starters about the relationship between science fiction and war, and about whether genre classifications are a necessary evil.

Most of the time, I will be reading what other bloggers’ contributions to the month. This, to me, is the best part, because so many of my fellow bloggers are new to me. So I’ll be searching Twitter for #RRSciFiMonth and reading and commenting on other blogs (this list of participants for Sci-Fi November is right here).

Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment to let me know you were here, even if all you want to say is “Hi!”