The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and… — 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.… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Everyone can guess what 'Corn Flakes' tastes like, even if you've never had them. But what, pray tell, does 'High School Musical'… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from… — 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
