Mark Stackpole

I don't think Humbert, Quilty & Co. fit into the SPB trope. The closest VN came to it was in the Pnin stories in the New Yorker, and even then B part was left out of the formula.

The SBP trope outlined above produced a novel of lasting literary value exactly once: John Williams <b>Stoner</b> (1965).

My early morning brain is so foggy, I thought tellthis was a Greek term that only select scholars of the Byzantine empire would nod sagely to in recognition.

@hntdove.bsky.social Could you explain to me a 25 year old joke? In the intro to "The Last Word" you mention that one of the bit players became prominent in the real world, but going over the text I can't winkle it out

At last! The casus belli.

Kij's sequel is <b>The River Bank</b> (2017). Her motivation in writing it was to incorporate some female characters (a young mole lady & a rabbit) into KG's male only world. It's been 8 years and a couple of hundred books, but I believe in this sequel Badger is very much alive at the last page

Why assume we're in a redo of 44 BC, when a Puzo reprise is a much more likely scenario (Today the Don settles all family business).

I will assume that you're familiar with ‪@kijjohnson.bsky.social 's lovely sequel to The Wind and the Willows? Dunno if it'll have any bearing on your currently cooling essay.

Wanda Gág was my personal Patient Zero for the fatal case of ailuromania I've been suffering from for the past 60 years.

Confusing Paul W.S. Anderson with other the Andersons that possess talent, ability, craft, vision and artistry is a longstanding sh*tposting tradition.

I've said this before, but I am impressed that the young Ms Griffith resisted any temptation to churn out for the insatiable maw of Del Rey endless paperback sequels of Marghe's further adventures on Jeep.

Testify! Yet another of director Anderson's dreadful adaptations, right down there with Inherent Vice and The Fantastic Mister Fox.

AEVV's strongest (strike that, only worthwhile) work was from the 1940s, when he was transcribing his dreams (with all their irrationally & imagery) into sturdy pulp SF. After he got swallowed up by L. Ron's Dianetics (via his editor Campbell, jr.) in the 1950s, he was never the same

FYI "I'm Still Here" is going into wider release next month.

Help me. I still think that Steven Soderbergh and Barry Sonnenfeld are the same person. (It's a logical creative progession from Addams Family Values to Che).

You people are clearly not familiar with Project 2025. The plan for this Summer's Canuckschluss is to spin off Québec as an independent Francophone buffer state between the US and Greenland. Hope this helps.

That bastard really did take the secret of how they make the baby in Eraserhead to his grave. #DavidLynch

Disaster: Arnold Schoenberg archive is destroyed in LA fires - Slippedisc A grim message from Larry Schoenberg, the composer’s...

slippedisc.com/2025/01/disa...

Those were glorious days in the early 1990s when every couple of months an issue of Asimov's or a Datlow anthology would have a new Lucius tale. Where the heck did yesterday's snow get off to?

Well, going by his more recent work - just like Charles Stross - I have Adrian T. classified as a fantasy author nowadays.

Add Baxter, Morgan, Meaney and the Empire adjacent Egan.

Stateside SF has been
unceremoniously smothered - only you Brits (yourself, MacAuley, Hamilton & Reynolds) are keeping the torch burning.

Me at the start of 2024 / me at the end of 2024

What are your thoughts on the final ending scene?

Cynical young me thought it was a cheat, reeking of network standards & practices.

Now that I've outlived both Rod and William, I believe something needed to be done to soften the blow.

Now that you've pointed it out to me, it's crystal - though I read the Elf novel more as the entire Middle Earth populace portaling into the Midlands.

*Squint* Darger & Surplus? The Mongolian Wizard? Another groundbreaking essay (“A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” broke me out of my mid-1980s Analog only reading rut)? Or something brand new? Any & all are welcome.

@cstross.bsky.social Appreciate you let that throwaway line "Case Nightmare Green" determine the course of the Laundry Files. After a quarter of a century the only loss I feel is that you subsequently abandoned each novel being a parody/homage of a suspense writer (le Carré, Flemming, Deighton)

Reading the new Murakami, I discovered a 1920 collection of speeches by a Samoan chief that was globally popular (including Japan) but had zero cultural impact in the English world (1st translation: 1975). Erich Scheurmann's hoax "The Papalagi". Much is lost when it ain't in English it dosen't exist

Five writers of whom I've read 10+ books (in the past decade):

Mack Reynolds
Somtow Sucharitkul
W. Sommerset Maugham
John Brunner
Henry James