jblum's Journal

Okay, still working on our Guest of Honor speech for the NZ con. And I could really use some help.

Paging

catsparks,

flyingsauce,

angriest,

gregmce,

thegameiam,

murasaki1966, anyone else who thinks they're reasonably up on the things that have been developing in literary SF in the past ten years...

What are they?

I'm trying to draw a picture of the overall trends, but I'm not sure how many of the famous developments are only "famous to me", as Kate once put it. I can gas on a little bit about the New Weird, but a lot of the stuff I've been seeing develop has been more on the fantasy end of the spectrum than SF. (Which will be part of the point we'll be talking about, that the cultural pendulum has swung tremendously towards fantasy and comic-booky stuff and away from galaxy-spanning SF in particular.)

I'd love to talk a bit about the growth of small presses over the last decade, and the way the Internet has made it both easier to find obscure bits of writing but harder to filter the wheat from the chaff, but how it's still not quite what people were hoping for a decade ago...

Any insights, people? Please? Help?