Michael Cassutt: Re-Boot

These are good times for sci-fi, right? (…) And yet … maybe it’s the time of year … autumn days growing shorter (God knows it couldn’t be age), but I find myself not only bored but sometimes irritated with the whole idea of constructing or even enjoying stories involving spaceships … time travel … robots and artificial intelligence … climate change and looming apocalypse … I even look at the crop of new sci-fi series and think, vampire cop, immortal cop, time-traveling cop. Eh.

S. M. Duke: Killing Speculative Literature

In the last year I’ve been realizing some growing trends that have made reading very difficult for me. Some of these trends have been in books that have gained popularity and the worst part of this is that these books become examples of good speculative literature when in reality they are not even good literature to begin with. We should not accept these trends, or allow these trends in any way to shape the direction of speculative literature.

George Mann: Marrying Authors to their Market: A Genre Perspective

You’d think it would be easy – in the science fiction and fantasy field – to publish a book that appeals to science fiction and fantasy fans, the traditional “core genre market”. After all, isn’t every fantasy novel just a retelling of The Lord of the Rings and every science fiction novel just Star Wars by another name?

Lou Anders: The Big Book Cover Post: Wizards and Spaceships

(…) Personally, I do not not not like the move away from illustration to design that I see coming out from a lot of houses (though it has its place for individual books - I’m talking about a general trend). I think to forgo illustration is to sacrifice one of the core strengths of SFF and one of its unique selling points. I do, however, think you can have cake and eat too.