Reprint: Scientists

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Angela Carter, C.P. Snow, Carter Scholz, Charles Dickens, Charles Harness, Clifford D. Simak, Connie Willis, Don DeLillo, Frank Herbert, Gregory Benford, Iain Pears, Ian McEwan, Ian Watson, John Banville, Jonathan Swift, Lucius Shepard, Michael Crichton, Nancy Kress, Pamela Zoline, Piers Anthony, Rafael Carter, Roger Zelazny, Russell McCormmach, Thomas More, William Boyd

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one first appeared in Vector 211, May-June 2000.

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Reprint: John Clute

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Arthur C Clarke, Dave Garnett, David Langford, Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn, Garry Kilworth, Gene Wolfe, George Hay, Iain Banks, John Clute, John Grant, John Radford, Judith Clute, Ken MacLeod, Lisa Tuttle, m john harrison, Mary Gentle, Maurice Goldsmith, Mike Moir, Neil Gaiman, Northrop Frye, Pamela Zoline, Pat Cadigan, Peter Nicholls, Scott Bradfield, Thomas M. Disch, William Gibson

This Appreciation of John Clute was published in the Loncon 3 Programme Book, where he was, of course, Guest of Honour:

Analysis

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Christopher Priest, Connie Willis, David Hartwell, James Morrow, John Banville, John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Kathryn Morrow, Pamela Zoline, Simon R. Green, Tom Godwin, Tony Daniel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vernor Vinge, Wyn Wachhorst, Yevgeny Zamiatin

I had always planned to end my run of daily posts on this blog on my birthday, but illness meant shifting it a day earlier.

I had a couple of things in mind when I started this exercise back at the beginning of August. The first and simplest reason was that I have, over the years, produced an awful lot of material that has only ever appeared in print media. So I thought it would be useful, for my purposes as much as anything, to start putting in online. It’s a start only. I’ve now put online a reasonable if random selection of reviews, articles, columns and interviews that have appeared in Vector, New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, various fanzines and convention publications over the last 14 years. It’s not everything from that period by any means, and I’ll periodically put up others over the next weeks and months, I just don’t intend to do it on such an intensive basis. As for earlier material: I’d like to do the same for that, but in those cases it will require scanning or retyping the pieces, and at the moment I have far too many other things on my mind.

The second reason was to revitalise the blog. I’ve never been systematic in putting pieces up here. At times, months can pass between posts. My intentions for the blog have always been low-key, but I had never intended such neglect. So I thought this would give me a regular pattern of posting for a while, with other reprintings waiting in the wings to sustain a more regular presence. And that worked, rather better than expected. Regular traffic on the blog has increased (a side effect, but welcome), and it has also inspired more original pieces from me than I think I’ve managed in any similar period for a long time.

So far, so good, therefore. But then …

Reprint: The Heat-Death of the Universe

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Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Norbert Weiner, Pamela Zoline, Virginia Woolf

Yesterday was a bit of a shock to the system. I got more than three times as much traffic on this blog as on my previous best day. Obviously the way to get more traffic is to say something vaguely polemical about hard sf and politics. Who knew hard sf was still such a burning topic? I will probably return to the topic in a few days, when I’ve had time to think a little more on the subject. But for now, a complete change of pace. This is another of my ‘In Short’ columns, this time on Pamela Zoline’s utterly wonderful ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. The column was first published in Vector 268, Autumn 2011.