Alice and Kev is a marvelously well-written story in blog form documenting the lives of two Sims who are homeless: Kev, a father who suffers from mental illness (and who is also a jerk), and his daughter Alice, who is a good person but also rather unlucky.
It’s rather amazing to read, and the screenshots really make it. Go check it out.
If you didn’t show up for the Tobias Buckell event in Metaplace, you missed out. We had a great hour-long conversation, along the lines of “Inside the Actor’s Studio” only with a writer. 🙂 The full chatlog is up on Posterous, but here’s a sample:
Sunchaser: You were born in the Caribbean, and now live in the US. How does your childhood in the Caribbean influence your story telling?
tobiasbuckell: Well, one thing I didn’t find much of in the science fiction I was reading were positive portrayels (sp?) of people from the developing world
tobiasbuckell: so I set out to bring more of that
tobiasbuckell: the Cyberpunk writers really inspired me to feel comfortable about being an SF/F author, as Bruce Sterling set 1/3 of a book of his
tobiasbuckell: in Grenada, where I grew up
tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to infuse my SF/F, a genre I adored, and add this aspect to it
tobiasbuckell: a lot of people act as if multiculturalism is a burden or ‘PC’ thing, but it seemed to me that the future is cosmopolitan and aried and mixed, so I wanted to see more of thatSunchaser: I’m sure you get this question all the time, but what led you to science fiction in the first place?
tobiasbuckell: SF/F became my love when I started reading very young, I remember reading Clarke’s Childhood’s End at 6 or 7
tobiasbuckell: blew my little mind
tobiasbuckell: so I wanted to recapture more of that, and looked for that genre after a whileSunchaser: I felt that way the first time I read about the red planet
tobiasbuckell: it’s the heroin addiction theory of Literature
We’re running this Creative Series biweekly, so stay tuned for more…
Toby Buckell, author of Crystal Rain, Sly Mongoose, Ragamuffin, and the sixth Halo novel, The Cole Protocol, and lots of other work, will be live on TheStage in Metaplace tomorrow at 2pm Pacific as part of our Creative Series. I’ve written before about his books, so you know I am excited about this. 🙂
Here is his blog post about it.
To attend, just click this link (register first, so you don’t go through the newbie tutorial at the last minute). TheStage is linked off of the theater in Metaplace Central.
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has published stories in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of The Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist.
Locus reports that Paul O. Williams has passed. Seems like many of the authors I read as a teen are leaving us. He’s best known for The Pelbar Cycle, which is a seven book post-apocalyptic series that can be somewhat hard to get into, but was still kind of mindblowing for me when I was a kid. It’s rather obscure now, but well worth reading. They are set in a clearly recognizable America well after some sort of nuclear holocaust, and are remarkable for their characters and the emphasis on describing cultures and rebuilding, rather than destructive aftermath.
Start with The Breaking of Northwall, and work your way through all seven. Heck, I remember building a Lode Runner level based on The Fall of the Shell…
He apparently only wrote one more SF book (though many of poetry), which I now have on order.
Yesterday I had a real urge to play some guitar for people. It used to be that I’d get to do a few hours of playing songs for people at every Cub Scout camp-out — but David is into Scouts proper now, and I don’t go on the camping trips. So I left the office saying, “I might do a concert thing in Metaplace this weekend…” A few folks said to let them know if I did.
Which just added to the pressure! I had never tried it before! So I figured that I should do a dry run first. And I did it last night, and you know, it was a heck of a lot of fun — but also pretty different. So here’s what I did and what it felt like. I am sure some of this is old hat to those of you who have done lots of this in Second Life, but it was new to me. 🙂
