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 More Quotes by Paul Di Filippo More Quotes From Paul Di Filippo The term 'steampunk' itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like 'Big Bang' in cosmology, the diss became the standard. Paul Di Filippo joke big like honor The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. Paul Di Filippo myth beast fantasy long 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 of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and embarked on fascinating doings, their story told in sprightly visual fashion. Paul Di Filippo story birth fashion book 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 creator creation circumstances want Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville. Paul Di Filippo weird new winning work Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned. Paul Di Filippo ancestors only hard change Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein. Paul Di Filippo politics strong science religion The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person. Paul Di Filippo person think comedy tragedy 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 doom or struggle. Paul Di Filippo humor struggle science culture Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold. Paul Di Filippo fantasy wisdom lord fall Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology. Paul Di Filippo technology darkness humanity long 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, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic. Paul Di Filippo bag fantasy magic science I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience. Paul Di Filippo something start young writing
