be well. do good work. keep in touch.

Hello, readers.

It’s Tuesday.

In other news, it’s lovely to see The Yellow Volume making its way around the webs¹. Someone once said that one good thing to do when you grow up is to do good work with good people². That’s The Yellow Volume. Good work. Good people. And for a good cause, the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

In other news related to that previous other news, former Clarion graduate, Ted Chiang, once published a story called, “Story of Your Life.” A film based on that story, Arrival ³ opens on Nov 11. A lot of places have already reviewed it. Presumably because they possess time travel technology. Or because they can see the future. Most people can. The future’s right over there. Oh, wait. No. That’s just a squirrel with goggles on. I thought it was the future.

In final news, I reviewed Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky for Strange Horizons.

In the aftermath of shattered hope and scorched wonder, the novel continues in a more elegiac tone. Sarcasm shuffles off in the face of floods of despair, not to mention the actual floods of climate change which, as foretold in our real world by various sources of non-fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and myth, make an appearance. “Everybody was singing madrigals,” we are told. “Tight staggered harmonies that rang with a lightness that had sharp pieces of melancholy embedded in it” (p. 341). You won’t find a better description of All the Birds in the Sky than that. It is a work of much heart and hope. Some may find the chumminess of its tone saccharine. Some may find the magic rendered with neither enough wonder nor irony. Some may find the science rendered with neither enough rigor nor reverence. Some may be annoyed at the novel’s marriage of conflicts as mundane as burnt casserole with those as miraculous as a witch, floating like a balloon, directing bolts of lightning into the throat of a mecha.

Happy Tuesday, readers.

ttfn.

1. For example, here and here and here and here. ↩︎
2. By which I mean this video by John Green, What To Do With Your Life. ↩︎
3. Not to be confused with The Arrival, the 1996 film with Charlie Sheen, in which shenanigans. ↩︎