Casinos vs. Casinos
Who's funding all the anti-casino ads in Maryland this election year? Casinos in West Virginia, reports Slate.
View ArticleA New Year's Eve news roundup
Secret Weapons. Agence France-Presse reports on researcher Ray Waru’s discoveries in New Zealand’s national archives, including a top-secret World War II effort by New Zealand and the United States to...
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I won a Nebula Award!
My story "Close Encounters" has won the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Here's the complete list of winners and nominees in each...
View ArticleOn inclusion in SFF
In the nearly 20 years I have been active in SFF, I repeatedly have told hundreds of aspiring writers – undergraduates, Clarion and Clarion West classes, workshoppers all over the place – that SFF is a...
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Coll's "King of the Khyber Rifles" (1916)
I can't afford to bid on this 1916 Joseph Clement Coll illustration -- one of a series that accompanied Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles on its original serialization in Everybody's Magazine --...
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I'm a Hugo and Nebula finalist
My co-writer Ellen Klages and I are finalists for the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both in the Best Novella category, for "Wakulla Springs" (Tor.com, October 2013).Tor.com illustration by Gary...
View ArticleThe story of "Beluthahatchie"
I'm delighted that the May issue of Clarkesworldreprints my 1997 story "Beluthahatchie," alongside new stories by Maggie Clark, Matthew Kressel and E. Catherine Tobler, plus another Southern reprint --...
View ArticlePolitics in sf, or, which side am I on?
(Just posted to Facebook, and reposted here.) Many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in the science fiction/fantasy trades, assuming that I will agree with them because I have known them for...
View ArticleP.S. to Politics in sf, or, which side am I on?
(Just posted to Facebook -- after hundreds of Likes and scores of comments -- and reposted here.)Folks, y'all have ranged far beyond the topic of my original post. May I ask those who'd like to debate...
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Alan Turing in South Carolina, 1937
In December 1937, while at Princeton, the young mathematical genius Alan Turing traveled with his friend Venable Martin to visit Martin's hometown, which Turing's biographer calls only "a small town in...
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Clarion 2016: I'm teaching Week Three
Caption: This is one of my favorite photos from Clarion 2013, my previous stint teaching the six-week workshop in San Diego. Patrick Ropp (right) clearly is not at all intimidated by Jessica Cluess...
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Happy birthday, Sydney
Sydney in our Abingdon, Va., hotel room in August 2015, celebrating that she had, indeed, remembered to pack her jeans.This is the time of year when I pick up, then discard, scores of birthday cards,...
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The legend of the belled buzzard
Illustration from The Sylva Herald.Jerome Clark devotes a chapter of his book Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (Visible Ink, 2013; 3rd ed.) to...
View ArticleA call for Western Maryland weirdness
As an ongoing research project, I hope to compile an exhaustive list of Western Maryland weirdness. Whether it’s factual, fanciful or in dispute, I’d like to know about anything in Garrett, Allegany,...
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The Piggie Park defense
(This is re-posted from my Facebook page, where many comments can be found.)As I graduated from an all-white South Carolina private academy that my parents helped found in defiance of school...
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Man Against Myth by Barrows Dunham (1947)
On my groaning bookcases devoted to pseudoscience, urban legends and folklore in general, a battered first-edition hardcover, without dust jacket, has sat for years, since I blindly retrieved it from a...
View ArticleNew sale: "The Devil's Whatever" will be in The Book of Magic, ed. Gardner...
I just sold a new novelette, "The Devil's Whatever," to Gardner Dozois for his upcoming Book of Magic anthology, which I believe will be a 2018 Bantam hardover with new work from Eleanor Arnason,...
View ArticleEver more just, every day
Some version of this likely is going on my syllabi this fall.As a fiftysomething Southern white man, I am inevitably associated, by history and current events alike, with the most toxic elements of...
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Brian Aldiss, 1925-2017
I took this photo of Brian Aldiss the last time I saw him, at the World Science Fiction Convention in London, three years ago this summer. He was busily signing books at the PS Publishing table...
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Kit Reed, 1932-2017
(I first posted this on Facebook on Sept. 29, 2017.)Sydney and Andy Duncan, Kit Reed and David G. Hartwell at ICFA in Orlando, Fla., March 2012.I keep trying, and failing, to write about the remarkable...
View Article"An occurrence, partaking of the marvelous": The legendary rocking cradle of...
In the first volume of L.B. Taylor Jr.'s long-running series The Ghosts of Virginia (1993), one chapter is titled "The Extraordinary Rocking Cradle." It begins:From the beginnings of my research for...
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Some recommended reading from 2017
If I had to pick one, my story of the year still would be "The Wretched and the Beautiful" by E. Lily Yu, from Terraform.Here are a few things published in 2017 that I commend to y'all's attention,...
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Recommended reading from 2020
Clearly I overprepared for Sunday's Capclave panel titled Best Fiction of 2020, as there were (gasp) other people on the panel, with even taller stacks. And I was silly to think we'd have time to talk...
View ArticleLetter to my undergrad students, Nov. 9
I sent this letter via Canvas Announcements to all my Frostburg State University classes Monday, Nov. 9.Hello! How are you?Yeah, I’m panicked, too. Let’s all take a deep breath, please …hold it a few...
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"Rights are inherent": Letter to the editor, Feb. 12, 2022
The Cumberland Times-News published by latest letter to the editor this weekend, dated Feb. 12, under the headline "Rights are inherent." The text is below.==Rights must be earned, argues David Biser...
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