NEW EPISODE
We talked about every AI chatbot creating a fictional guy named Elias Thorne, "modernizing" old children's lit, and more
soundcloud.com/printrunpodc...
This week we catch up on two pieces that caught our eye: one on the modernization of older children’s literature to match contemporary culture, and another on how every LLM chatbot keeps telling stori
It's always good to talk the talk with @casella.bsky.social, even when it's about something as sticky as Stand On Zanzibar.
I *think* we came out feeling it had been worth hacking away at it. We certainly covered a lot of ground in and around what is a troublesome book.
How well? You decide ...
oh my god 😭
It's not entirely a surprise to me that the Critical Friends episode about established writers has attracted less discourse than the one about debut writers, but it's probably a topic I worry about more.
A week out from recording our next episode: on rereading #Tolkien — and we’d like to hear your thoughts and experiences! Email us at [email protected] or post a reply to this post if you’d like. Here’s a thread from today on doing a reread if you’d like a handy example.
PRINT RUN
Weekend crowd, in case you missed it:
Such a strange and compelling fever dream of a novella. Saving for later!
some weeks it blows my mind a little that we're up to post 8/episode 9 and there are still more than 100 posts and readers to go
Join us as we read the Clarke Award shortlist! Alison and Liz judge John’s own judging, and then they ask him questions about his judging and judge his answers. We hope you judge that this is a good episode. The word “judge” looks weird now.
Listen here! octothorpe.podbean.com/e/161-you-pa...
Episode 52! @danhartland.bsky.social returns for a discussion of John Brunner's cynical yet sympathetic STAND ON ZANZIBAR, what it's like to read it today, and how its failures of prescience might be the best thing about it:
By-the-Bywater
Niall Harrison
Amal El-Mohtar
A Meal of Thorns
Indrapramit Das
Dan Hartland
Octothorpe
Molly Templeton
Brunner’s prescient classic about overpopulation: is it about overpopulation? Was it prescient? And, for that matter: what does it mean to be a classic? Reviewer and editor Dan Hartland joins…
🎧 NEW PODCAST TO PUT IN YOUR EARS. 🎧
In this month’s Critical Friends, @kateem.bsky.social and Duncan Lawie talk about reading writers with back catalogues: how to start, how to you think about them, what to do when they publish another new book?
On oeuvres (with apologies to the French language):
And the Nebula Award for Novella goes to... 👀
The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia) 🥳
Congratulations to ALL our novella-writers. Your work moves mountains in genre!
#61stNebulas #SFWA
I just re-read Lord of the Rings, and at 58, I rethought my impression of the book. In previous readings, I felt like it was all about decay and decrying change, and that every day that passed took us farther from some not-mythical ideal previous way of living. But it is not so.
