As usual, if you’d like to see the whole conversation on one page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see a drop down menu above, click here and it should show up. Jonathan Strahan I LOVE awards. I love them in a way that is probably slightly unbalanced. I [...]

As usual, if you’d like to see the whole conversation on one page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see a drop down menu above, click here and it should show up. Andy Duncan John’s and Paul’s comments, taken together, make me pose a related question to the group: [...]

Karen Burnham This weekend, awards season really geared up. The BSFA and Ditmar awards were announced, and the Hugo award nominations were revealed. Congratulations, by the way, to all the winners and nominees reading this! So what do awards do for us as a community? Do they help shape the dialog, or are they just [...]

Later today (4pm CST) the Hugo nominations will be announced. But some 2010 awards are already coming out. At Eastercon yesterday, the British Science Fiction Awards were announced. As per SF Awards Watch, the results are: Best Novel WINNER: Ian McDonald – The Dervish House (Gollancz) Paolo Bacigalupi – The Windup Girl (Orbit) Lauren Beukes [...]

To follow on from my recent post on rogue AIs (and to celebrate the lack of missiles being launched by a newly awakened Skynet), I decided to post this podcast that I recorded with Ted Chiang recently. While we start off talking about Greg Egan’s work, we move into a broader discussion of AIs–how they [...]

I’m reading another book right now that has a self-aware AI emerging from The Internet or other complex computer system. It seems like I’ve read quite a few novels and stories using this trope over the last few years. Probably the most recently prominent would be Robert J. Sawyer’s WWW trilogy, of which the first, [...]

Paul Graham Raven writes on Transhumanism for the New Scientist. Strange Horizons dedicated a week to author Nisi Shawl, including story “Pataki” and an essay by Shawl, “Race, Again, Still.” Paul McAuley on “How to Write a Generic SF Novel.” (“No amount of exposure to suffering or slaughter should alter your hero in any significant [...]

At ICFA, I was lucky enough to be on the same continent as regular Locus Roundtable contributor, Graham Sleight. We took advantage of the opportunity to sit down and record a podcast without worrying about time zone coordination. We talk about: the classic sf space futures that never were, how the field has changed and [...]

For the last word on this series, we turn to Sandra McDonald. She is the author of novels The Outback Stars, The Stars Down Under, and The Stars Blue Yonder, and has a short story collection out titled Diana Comet and Other Tales. Her short story “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” was a finalist in the [...]

During the International Conference in the Fantastic in the Arts, I was lucky enough to sit down with these four distinguished writers: Theodora Goss, Eileen Gunn, Cecelia Holland, and Paul Park. We talked about: teaching, role models, the way that teachers can have positive or negative effects on students, writing non-fiction as well as fiction, [...]