Big Idea Category
The Big Idea: Walter Jon Williams
Posted on February 29, 2012 32 Comments
Walter Jon Williams is thinking about the entertainment media of the future in his latest novel The Fourth Wall, and despite all the technological advances that have been made in entertainment — and are yet to be made — there will still be some things that are constant, for better or worse. What things will […]
The Big Idea: Chad Orzel
Posted on February 28, 2012 11 Comments
A couple of years ago physics professor Chad Orzel (and his dog Emmy) endeavored to explain physics to humans with How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. That book went on to become a worldwide success, with translations into ten languages to date. How do you follow up? By diving deeper into an especially strange […]
The Big Idea: Robert Jackson Bennett
Posted on February 24, 2012 18 Comments
What does YouTube have to do with the vaudeville theaters that used to pepper the United States — and what do either have to do with Art (yes, with a capital “A”)? These are excellent questions, and in the course of writing The Troupe, Shirley Jackson Prize-winner (and current Edgar and Philip K Dick award […]
The Big Idea: Bruce Schneier
Posted on February 16, 2012 23 Comments
Do you trust me? And if so, why do you trust me? And what do you trust me for? “Trust” is an interesting term, with some simple definitions, and others that aren’t so simple. Or so Bruce Schneier, the noted security expert, discovered as he was putting together his latest book Liars and Outliers. The […]
The Big Idea: Stephen Deas
Posted on February 14, 2012 9 Comments
When is a dragon not a dragon? The answer is: almost never, because, dude, look at them. They’re totally dragons. But as Stephen Deas found when writing The Order of the Scales, the third book in The Memory of Flames, when you’re writing about dragons, you’re not always necessarily writing about the dragons themselves — […]
The Big Idea: Matt Ruff
Posted on February 9, 2012 24 Comments
A world in which 9/11 is 11/9 –– and that’s not to only reversal Matt Ruff brings to The Mirage, which features terrorist attacks and a struggle between the Arabic and Western worlds, i.e., the same recipe as events in our world, but with a few important changes. Ruff’s alternate history is getting noticed (“entertaining […]
The Big Idea: Saladin Ahmed
Posted on February 7, 2012 41 Comments
Influences aren’t just things as a writer that you pull from — they can also be things that you push against. And sometimes you do both at once. Saladin Ahmed knows about this; in his widely acclaimed debut Throne of the Crescent Moon (which has garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus […]
The Big Idea: Rod Rees
Posted on February 2, 2012 25 Comments
Well, I hope you folks have had your coffee this morning, because author Rod Rees is about to get deep on you all, on the subject of the nature of reality. He’s doing so in the context of The Demi-Monde: Winter, the first in a series of books in which the real world mixes and […]
The Big Idea: Myke Cole
Posted on January 31, 2012 37 Comments
Magic can do many things. It can raise fire. It can rain down dragons. It can make things move with the power of one man’s mind. But how does it stand up to bureaucracy? What if that bureaucracy is of a military bent? These are some of the things author Myke Cole has thought about. […]
The Big Idea: Michele Lang
Posted on January 17, 2012 11 Comments
In the course of human events, the actual individual humans can matter. At the very least Michele Lang seems to think so; in today’s Big Idea about her latest novel Dark Victory, Lang looks at how individual people have made a difference to others in the tale of their own lives, and how that point […]
The Big Idea: Daniel O’Malley
Posted on January 12, 2012 34 Comments
There’s an observation, made by humorist Robert Benchley, that says that a man may do remarkable things, so long as it’s not the thing he’s supposed to be doing at the time. Daniel O’Malley has put that into practice — from a series of boring meetings has come the idea that animates his novel The […]
The Big Idea: Marissa Meyer
Posted on January 10, 2012 15 Comments
Fairy tales have been around for centuries — and will be around for centuries because their core stories are adaptable to changing times and circumstances. If you doubt this, take a gander at Cinder, author Marissa Meyer’s new take on the Cinderella story. What changes does she make and what do they mean for the […]
The Big Idea: Sarah Prineas
Posted on January 6, 2012 10 Comments
The American Midwest is many things, including the breadbasket of the nation — but is it a fertile field for fantasy tales? Author Sarah Prineas asked herself this question prior to writing her new young adult fantasy novel, Winterling. Her answer awaits you below. SARAH PRINEAS: When starting my new book, Winterling, I wanted to […]
The Big Idea: Stephen Blackmoore
Posted on January 4, 2012 12 Comments
Author Stephen Blackmoore was on a mission with his novel City of the Lost: To tell a gritty, hard-boiled thriller of a story in a way that wasn’t like a 70s detective TV show. And you ask, well, okay, but what does a 70s crime detective show have to do with anything to begin with? […]
The Big Idea: Adam Christopher
Posted on December 29, 2011 22 Comments
Adam Christopher’s debut novel Empire State isn’t just a novel — it’s the start of an interesting initiative by his publisher Angry Robot to let readers into the parallel New York Christopher has created. Christopher’s own journey to the Empire State was a long and twisting one itself, spanning continents and book genres in equal […]
The Big Idea: Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
Posted on December 28, 2011 50 Comments
Here’s a Big Idea piece full of the magic of living in the electronic age: authors Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge saw an opportunity with the advent of DIY eBook publishing to resurrect their Exordium space opera series (of which Ruler of Naught is the second book) — but more than that, they saw an […]
The Big Idea: Ryan David Jahn
Posted on December 27, 2011 9 Comments
This is another one for the “where do you get your ideas?” file: Ryan David Jahn was on the trail of a day job and found a novel instead. How did that happen? And what tweaks did he need to make to have his real life job hunt take the shape of The Dispatcher, the […]
The Big Idea: John C. Wright
Posted on December 20, 2011 60 Comments
One of the things about science fiction as a genre is that it has the ability — some might even suggest the responsibility — to think big. Galaxy-spanning big. With his latest novel Count to a Trillion, author John C. Wright is taking that ability and running with it, positing a civilization that not only […]
The Big Idea: Eric Griffith
Posted on December 16, 2011 10 Comments
Not every writer comes up with an idea and immediately moves on it. Some let the idea sit and develop — or let life get them to a point where they’re ready to take it on. Take Eric Griffith and his novel Beta Test. The idea was there, but were the conditions ripe for the […]
The Big Idea: Jennifer Brozek
Posted on December 9, 2011 1 Comment
We all know what it’s like to be human — you’re doing it right now. And having the knowledge could make it difficult to imagine what it’s like to become human — to view that humanity from the outside, as it were. That was the mission of the writers who contributed to the anthology Human […]
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