'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Roald Dahl pioneered a new kind of literature for youngsters, one that dispensed with cant and solemnity, favoring anarchy and joy over duty and humbuggery while acknowledging that oftentimes no good deed goes unpunished. But ultimately, it was his sheer… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
