Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of… — 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 the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator. — 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
