Nov 22, 2010

Brave New Worlds Cover and TOC

From editor John Joseph Adams comes the cover and ToC for Brave New Worlds, his anthology of dystopias. I mention this because my Salon.com and F&SF story "Peter Skilling" is part of the anthology, which is due out from Night Shade Books in January. Most excellent company to be in, as you'll see in a sec...


* Introduction — John Joseph Adams
* The Lottery — Shirley Jackson
* Red Card — S. L. Gilbow
* Ten With a Flag — Joseph Paul Haines
* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas — Ursula K. Le Guin
* Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment — M. Rickert
* The Funeral — Kate Wilhelm
* O Happy Day! — Geoff Ryman
* Pervert — Charles Coleman Finlay
* From Homogenous to Honey — Neil Gaiman & Bryan Talbot
* Billennium — J. G. Ballard
* Amaryllis — Carrie Vaughn
* Pop Squad — Paolo Bacigalupi
* Auspicious Eggs — James Morrow
* Peter Skilling — Alex Irvine
* The Pedestrian — Ray Bradbury
* The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away — Cory Doctorow
* The Pearl Diver — CaitlĂ­n R. Kiernan
* Dead Space for the Unexpected — Geoff Ryman
* “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman — Harlan Ellison®
* Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution? — Genevieve Valentine
* Independence Day — Sarah Langan
* The Lunatics — Kim Stanley Robinson
* Sacrament — Matt Williamson
* The Minority Report — Philip K. Dick
* Just Do It — Heather Lindsley
* Harrison Bergeron — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
* Caught in the Organ Draft — Robert Silverberg
* Geriatric Ward — Orson Scott Card
* Arties Aren’t Stupid — Jeremiah Tolbert
* Jordan’s Waterhammer — Joe Mastroianni
* Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs — Adam-Troy Castro
* Resistance — Tobias S. Buckell
* Civilization — Vylar Kaftan
* For Further Reading — Ross E. Lockhart

Nov 1, 2010

Political Advice from H.P. Lovecraft

Not sure how much social commentary you want from a guy who had a cat named Ni**er-Man, but this is a pretty excellent rant.

As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and ...provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
- Letter to C.L. Moore, August 1936 quoted in “H.P. Lovecraft, a Life” by S.T. Joshi, p. 574

(from Mark Tiedemann)