RIP Dick Tufeld, voice of “Robby the Robot”
Dick Tufeld, a longtime radio and TV announcer who intoned “Danger, Will Robinson!” as the voice of the robot in the 1960s science-fiction TV series “Lost in Space,” has died. He was 85.
Happy Birthday, Charles Dodgson
Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.
Publicity and the Introvert | Theodora Goss
Some time ago, a writer friend told me that he was working on a novel, and that once the novel was finished, he would begin to publicize it. He would update his website, go on Facebook. Maybe even tweet. And I thought, how do I tell him that he’s leaving it way too late? That you should start doing publicity at least a year before you have anything coming out? If you start doing it when you have a novel coming out, no one will know who you are.
Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future
But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.
Some of my worst friends are books – Rick Gekoski
Writers and readers coexist and invent and reinvent each other in some symbiotic way, but that doesn’t make me mistake James Joyce for a friend. He died before I was born. I would never have met him even if he hadn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have liked him and he wouldn’t have been interested in me. Not a friend.
In the Land of the Non-Reader – Jonathan Gourlay
I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
“Apocalypse Soon” by Daniel Baird
It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting. At least then, the human story, swinging unstably as it does between heights of imagination and bottomless depths of depravity, doesn’t end, as T. S. Eliot’s bleak The Hollow Men would have it, with a whimper.
Thank You, Anarchists | The Nation
The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us.
Someone Else’s Children by Christopher Benfey
His iconic image, “A Morning’s Work,” shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day.
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