It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The term 'steampunk' itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like 'Big Bang' in cosmology, the… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
“Smellin' the beefaloes and leanpigs turnin' on their spits, holding a cold cheer-beer in my hand, watchin' the stars poppin' out one by one… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction - especially… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition.… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
