Author Paolo Bacigalupi (Ship Breaker) talks the why and what-it’s-good-for of SF

A great interview w/ Paolo B. from the Publisher’s Weekly info-packed site. Good insights into writing for adults vs YA, as well as general thoughts on sci fi and the mercurial meaning(s) of the oft-abused term”dystopia.”  

 

From publishersweekly.com:

“Paolo Bacigalupi’s first novel for young adults, Ship Breaker, won the 2011 Michael L. Printz Award and placed him firmly on the radar of the YA world – just a year after his debut adult novel, The Windup Girl, swept the major science-fiction honors, including the Hugo and Nebula Awards. On May 1, he returns to the post-cataclysmic realm of Ship Breaker with the release of The Drowned Cities, which moves the action from a futuristic Gulf Coast devastated by climate change to war-torn Washington, D.C. The author spoke with Bookshelf from the relative safety of his Colorado home about the differences between writing for adults and for teens, the distinction he draws between dystopias and science fiction, and why Conan the Barbarian was more than just another muscle-bound warrior.”

Find the rest of the article at: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/51699-q–a-with-paolo-bacigalupi.html

 

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Ice of the beholder

re: Vostok – here’s some hard science being done by NASA. The arty is on the astrobiology mag. site. (And then there’s the on-going scrum of: the use of terms exo-    vs. astrobiology in- and outside the SF realm. More on this in another post).

From the site: NASA’s ENDURANCE robot spent the morning in the repair shop today, after encountering glitches yesterday during its first test in the icy waters of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. The goal of the ENDURANCE project is to explore Lake Bonney, an ice-covered lake in Antarctica. That, in turn, will be a step toward a possible future mission to explore the ice-covered ocean of Jupiter’s giant moon Europa….

Full article at:

http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_expedition&task=detail&id=2618

 

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Brooding cyborgs, twisted science….

Award-winning publishing house Angry Robot is concocting a spankin’ new Young Adult SF & F imprint, set to debut in the fall of this year. (More about why I find this… interesting… at a later date….) Dubbed Strange Chemistry, this new division will constitute a test-tube-and-electrical-charge-filled mad-scientist lab intent on forging “…a global imprint dedicated to the best in modern Young Adult science fiction, fantasy, supernatural and everything in between.”

On their periodic table of authors/titles/release dates so far:

Gwenda Bond, Blackwood 9/12

Cassandra R. Clarke, The Assassin’s Curse 10/12

Sean Cummings, Poltergeeks 10/12

Kim Curran, Shift 9/12

Jonathan L. Howard, Katya’s World 11/12

A.E. Rought, Broken 1/13

 

Keep your light-and-motion-sensors targeted on these folks. Brave new worlds of reading ahead.

 

 

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cold, dark, wet… alive?

I’ve been following the Lake Vostok story off and on – last I heard the Russian crew had penetrated thru the last few meters, broke thru, pulled the rig up & let the trapped lake water pressure-rise up into the bore hole and freeze. (For the un-Vostoky: the lake is a huge body of water 13,000 feet under the surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it may have been effectively isolated from the outside world for up to 25 million years.) Next antarctic summer (ie, December), they’ll pull up ice core samples & test for signs of life. Of course, most of the stories on this link the lake’s relationship to our own solar system’s various moons with potential under-ice-crust oceans, kept in liquid form by gravitational stressing from their parent planets. There are a few far-future ideas for probes designed to go to places like Enceladus and Europa, melt thru the ice layer and motor around taking snaps of the local squidamadolphs. Any bets on what the Russians  might actually find when they examine their Vostok samples? Just bacteria? Algae? Ice sylphs? Plankton? Plankton eaters with mouths full of baleen-analogs and big ol’ inscrutable brains? Eyes that glow like a black smoke lurker’s foot-wide orbs? Ted Nugent’s career? Maybe just miles and miles of lightless wet? We wonder….

 

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