Thank you to Charles Payseur at Quick Sip Reviews for taking the time to read my work and write about it. Very cool!
Quick snippet “strange and haunting” and “great”!
If you need more, here are some snippets from his review of “Instructions for Astronauts”:
This is a rather strange and haunting poem about humanity fleeing Earth in an attempt to survive, in an attempt to get to a different and better world, one unspoiled by our touch.
There is a strong religious element to the poem, all of the parts preceded by a biblical verse (save two) to set up how those sections read. These are the sections of the believers, of the grand hope for humanity. The renewal, the what-have-you. And I love that the poem sets itself up that way, with everything working and working toward this end, only to pull away at the ending …
This post is part of Sci-Fi November, which you can read all about here.
I haven’t seen “Interstellar” yet, but I have seen the teaser trailer, the official trailer, TV commercials and some feature stories in the NY Times, so I’ve been given an impression of the film and know it will have moments of sheer transcendental brilliance, and it will be an overlong, bloated slog that will leaving me feeling dissatisfied.
Here’s my Half-Baked Theory on Movies Directed by Christopher Nolan: the shorter the running time the greater the satisfaction.
Case in point: “The Dark Knight” (clocking in at 152 minutes was a thrill ride, until it had to go and not end and follow through with the Harvey Dent / Two Face story). Thus it ranks as one of his least satisfying movies. “The Dark Knight Rises,” which is 13 minutes longer, is proportionally more dissatisfying: so much great spectacle (Hines Ward running as the football field behind him collapses? Wow!) and then so many stupid fist fights – FIST FIGHTS!?!?
Of course, I just came up with that theory off the top of my head, but the lengths of Christopher Nolan’s movies aren’t something that I alone am interested in. Peter Sciretta over that the Slash Film website even created this chart (URL for the chart is here):
Me, the author, autographing my story in “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History”
Readercon is awesome. The conference for speculative literature is always worthwhile, as it offers a deep dive into issues and concerns that are at the forefront of literature.
So I got to hear luminaries like Michael Dirda and Peter Straub talk about their development as readers and writers. (Dirda doesn’t have time to reread books; Straub is rereading Iris Murdoch right now.)
I got to hear Samuel Delaney read for a work in progress that is from the point of view from a young Herman Melvill(e), and includes scenes during his life and times in Albany.
I learned a lot about the difficulties of living in space (the weakening of the body in low gravity; the politics of funding); about how authors try to strike a balance between fulfilling and subverting readers’ expectations (though one panelist argued that very little writing is truly subversive); and that some Readercon attendees bring really killer bourbon and are very generous with it, late into the night.
Most of all, though, I met some great people — writer and readers — but people who share my values for the importance of story.
Even better, was being asked to autograph my story. This is something that I have never done before. With the journals and anthologies in which I have been published before, I never had a chance to attend any of the events related to the release of those publications. Mostly because they were far away: in Japan or on the West Coast; or my day job and life made it too hard for me to be there. Continue reading “Readercon wrap-up: ‘You don’t look Filipino’”→
