Swan Made: Gorgeous, gorgeous story, set against a backdrop of modern despair. A man living a grey life of quiet desperation finds passion in the most unlikely place. His inability to face what his visitor truly is nearly costs him the love of a lifetime. Of the serious stories, this one, along with the Merman’s Tale, was the most emotionally engaging and heart-wrenching.
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(what I’m especially loving is how so many reviews interpret it slightly differently. You could write a hundred different stories and get a response no more varied)
I’ve managed to get hold of John Wyndham’s Plan for Chaos, which is the book he never published. There’s a reason for that, but it’s a Wyndham and I am naturally smitten. This week’s links have a bit of a Sci Fi theme as as result!
Interest Piquing: HG Wells and Orson Welles interviewed together:
InsPiring: My sister is writing her dissertation on Algae biofuels, and whether it’s commercially viable to produce them in the EU. She’s very kindly let me read some of it, and I’m kinda blown away. I can’t shake the feeling oilgae’s more magic than science: it’s the ultimate enrivonmental panacea. You can grow it in sewage, it doesn’t take up areas used for food production like other biofuels, it’s biodegradable, it produces oxygen and devours CO2, you can use it in a diesel engine without modification (there was an interesting Boeing 737 experiment last year), you can burn it for heat, GM modifications are out-competed by natural so it can’t easily pollute the wild stocks, you can persuade it to produce hydrogen, and you can even eat the byproducts. Soylent green isn’t people!*
There’s some great diagrams (including this one and this) from oilgae.com and HR BioPetroleum, which have quite a bit of interesting info too. Useful for near-future research and general “Huh. Why aren’t we doing this already?”-ness.
Procrastination:The Hubble telescope’s gallery of images. I’ve been using it for research lately for the space romance, but frequently I’ll just go and browse because the images are so beautiful.
*Soylent, of course, being a name smoosh of Soya and Lentil as explained in Make Room! Make Room! In the film this is skimmed over and they aredescribed as high energy vegetable concentrates, while soylent green is supposedly high energy algae concentrate. Which would have more protein and vitamins than people anyway…
Procrastination: Scary Go Round. Addictive, adorable, and slightly surreal; a very British webcomic. Vaguely relted to Bobbins, and followed now by Bad Machinery, it’s received accolades from the Sunday Times and the Morning Star and one Web Cartoonist’s Choise Awards in 2003, 2005 and 2007.
Sorry for the radio silence yesterday; I’ll rectify that shortly. I’ve just finished revising Tease (which really shouldn’t have taken this long) and resubmitted it to Loose-Id. Fingers crossed!
I think there is a problem (obvious in a lot of comments to the above articles) with confusing plagiraism and copyright violation. Some people plagiarise works that are out of copyright – legally, there’s not a lot that can be done, but they’re still passing someone else’s work off as their own. Sometimes accidentally, sometimes without knowing that what they’ve done constitutes plagiarism. Cassie Edwards plagiarised non-fiction sources, claiming this didn’t count (though she did raise the plight of black-footed ferrets in the public’s mind, at least). It could all have been avoided with a list of credits in the back of the books (and putting it in her own words – plagiarised passages are often easy to spot because they’re not in the author’s voice). Plagiarism: know what it is, where it differs from copyright violation, and you know how to avoid doing it.
InsPiring:Caricature map of Europe, circa 1914. It was originally drawn for Leviathan by Scott Westerfield, a steampunk story in which Darwin discovered genetics (hence Clankers – the mechanical nations, and the Darwinists, the countries with genetically engineered bio-weapons). Frankly, I just find the map both awesome and inspiring, and I really want to read the book.
Interest Piquing: An Hour a Day Keeps the Existential Angst Away. A lot of what’s posted on the BBC Writer’s Room blog isn’t relevant to me, as it’s calls for scriptwriters or updates on the screenwriting classes. But everyone now and then it throws out something that’s relevant to every writer.
