A View From Corona #7

May 16th 2002 at 11:36 am

“Just because someone can read does not mean that he necessarily can read SF…” – David G. Hartwell

SF (including its sibling genres fantasy and horror) has a rich and varied history which infects, permeates, and informs most contemporary forms of the genre. This is at once a Good Thing(tm) as well as a Bad Thing(tm). It is a Good Thing because it means the even the most “low brow”, reader friendly space opera/fantasy/horror epic will by its very nature have a depth and complexity to it… simply because the author will be (usually intimately) familiar with the tropes and traditions of the genre, and there will be (at the very least, subconsciously in the authors mind) a dialog with what has gone before. Contemporary genre fiction is littered with winking allusions to previous genre works, both landmark and obscure. And a good percentage of the readers of genre fiction expect and like these allusions. They allow a reader to observe and participate in an ongoing dialog between multiple generations of writers who have all read the same things. This is one of the big pleasures of reading genre fiction of any stripe, be it SF/fantasy/horror, or Mystery/Crime, or Western or Romance.

A View From Corona #6

May 1st 2002 at 11:25 am

A World Horror Con 2002 Special Report: World Horror came and went… and I miss it already. The Hotel was shitty (something was wrong with the AC and climate control… After spending two hours in the hotel, I was dehydrated, and my lips were chapped. The dealers room alternated from each day from being a sauna to being a freezer, etc.), there wasn’t any good food for miles, and I didn’t see any part of Chicago. But I loved the convention. World Horror 2002 was the best! I flew in to O’Hare on the red-eye, and expected to get some sleep before things got rolling, but that never happened. From the moment I arrived at the hotel, the adrenaline was pumping, and it didn’t stop until I got off the plane Sunday night in San Francisco. Rather than bore you with a blow-by-blow account of what happened I will simply list some of the things that stuck out in my mind…