The Mumpsimus

Chris Garcia of the fanzine Drink Tank asked me if he could reprint my blog post on Julian Comstock in a Hugo issue, and after taking a look at some of the hundreds of back-issues, I happily said sure thing.  I'm woefully ignorant of most fanzines, but enjoyed what I read at Drink Tank , and the Hugo Special that's just been put up as a PDF is really a great read.  It's full of opinionated and not at all orthodox pieces about the Hugo Awards in general and this year's slate in particular. At Readercon last week, I was talking with John Kessel and Brett Cox about generational differences in the science fiction world, and the fact that many young writers got into SF through movies and books of the '80s and '90s rather than classics from the " Golden Age" eras.  John said, "But you seem to know some of that work," and I said I'm a weirdo because most of the SF I read in my early, most impressionable years came from a college library th...

They say the sky's the limit But the sky's about to fall Down come all them record books cradle and all They say before he bit it That the boxer felt no pain But somewhere there's a gamblin' man With a ticket in the rain... --The Low Anthem, "Ticket Taker" I've been intending to read something by Robert Charles Wilson for a while now, especially after Lydia Millet told me she was a fan. I've got a great talent for intending to read things, but my follow-through isn't always great, and so Wilson's new novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America , is the first of his books I've read. What ultimately got me reading Julian Comstock was Brian Slattery's 3-part interview with Wilson at Tor.com.  I adore Slattery's work, and trust his judgment, particularly when it comes to novels about the collapse of America as we know it.  I was intrigued, too, that the cover for Wilson's novel echoed the cover of Sl...