Hugh Howey is a true iconoclast. His newly released post apocalyptic novel, The Shell Collector, joins a body of inventive work exploring dystopian futures, interstellar travel, alien invasions, zombies and other curiosities. His career has also broken traditional barriers. Originally published by a small press, Hugh broke away to become an indie writer and subsequently made it to the NYT Best Seller List.There is something surprising about Hugh’s writing. His visions steal over the reader unobtrusively, the way one might notice the clarity of a sky or the scent of a spring day. His prose is lean, confident and unpretentious with moments of sheer philosophical grace. He sinks into the background so deeply, you forget you’re even reading. He extends an invitation, like a peep hole through a circus tent, and before you quite realize what’s happened, you’ve entered into a world of wonders. Odd wonders, to be sure. And once you’ve followed Hugh into a world, what unfolds is not always easy. His Sci Fi stories are fantastical but infused with a gritty reality borne from worldly … [Read more...] about Author Hugh Howey on Writing, Empathy and Creative Freedom
Archives for 2014
Author Dale Bridges on Satirical Sci Fi and Deconstructing Culture
Dale Bridges writes wildly inventive fiction. I'm not just tossing that phrase around either. His new short story collection, Justice Inc, reads like Phillip K Dick on crack. The stories are iconoclastic and charming, peppered with diabolical uses of modern technology and characters poised on a knife's edge between humanity and monstrosity. Bridges takes the reader through a series of mind-bending realities where people are adopted by corporations, text their way through an apocalypse, build themselves robot girlfriends and warp patriotism into a barbaric ritual of unsurpassed cruelty. The prose is well-crafted and the stories explore themes of gender, ageism, the commodification of life and even death with wry humor and an empathic understanding of human frailty. The protagonist is often an everyman who reveals the mechanics of the world, but each character is deeply flawed, often taking a surprising turn into damnation or redemption. Some worlds are topsy-turvy and others so close to our reality that Dale's finely-tuned observations have a tendency to sting. And though … [Read more...] about Author Dale Bridges on Satirical Sci Fi and Deconstructing Culture
Why Science says your Lovelife Sucks: 285,000 to 1
Can science be used to answer the existential quandaries that haunt us? Questions like why your love life sucks? Yes, it can! The Drake Equation was used by Carl Sagan to calculate the chances of highly evolved alien life existing in our galaxy. A physicist named Peter Backus applied the Drake Equation to a more pressing issue; his own statistical chance of finding a girlfriend. Read the paper here: Why I don't have a girlfriend. The results were not encouraging. After some mathematical gymnastics, Backus concluded, "There are 26 women in the UK with whom I might have a wonderful relationship. So, on a given night out in London there is a 0.000 34% chance of meeting one of these special people, about 100 times better than finding an alien civilization we can communicate with. That’s a 1 in 285,000 … [Read more...] about Why Science says your Lovelife Sucks: 285,000 to 1
