Monthly Archives: September 2013

reviewer suggestions wanted

Here’s a thought I had on the way home from Rose City Comic-Con: I need to get Rita in front of the eyes of people who review SF. Not just SF comics; I think a lot of people who review prose SF would find this of interest, too – I suspect a large percentage of the people following this thing are the kind of people who actively enjoy being dropped in at the deep end and figuring things out as they go along, which is a skill you tend to pick up by reading lots of SF.

But I’m kind of out of that loop. The last time I was getting regular reviews of SF books was when I was subscribing to Analog, Asimov, and F&SF, and had a bookshelf full of the things. Mostly I think I just get occasional pointers to new stuff via BoingBoing, nowadays. I’m not reading any kind of active review columns any more.

So I’m turning to my readership: Where do you get your reviews of new SF these days?

(PS: The Kickstarter for book 2 should be launching Tuesday or Wednesday.)

other people’s media you may enjoy

This looks like an interesting game. I’ve backed it.

The setup reminds me a lot of Iain M. Banks’s short story ‘Descendant’ (in the ‘State of the Art’ collection). But the AI-rights angle is new to this piece – and it’s set in a pretty different environment, too.

I’m deliberately avoiding doing a story about the rights of AIs in ‘Decrypting Rita’; it’s a problem I think we’re going to need to be confronting soon, and one I have definitely taken sides on – but it’s not an issue I’m interested in grappling with. I’d rather just tell a story set in a world where that battle has been had, and my side won. (If you’re wondering, there ARE people in Rita1’s world who think AIs shouldn’t be treated as fully human, but they have about as much respect as a backwoods Louisiana bigot who misses the days of slave ownership. You won’t be seeing any of them in the story.)

I don’t want to tell a Struggle For AI Rights story, but I’m glad there are people who do. And I’m glad to be able to support them when it looks like they’re going to make an interesting one.