Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To be Radchaai is to be civilised.
Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.
I've been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.
Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is.
I don't think anybody submits their first story and sells right away.
Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.
What, after all, was the point of civilisation if not the well-being of citizens?
In non-fiction, I found John Gardner's two writing books to be tremendously helpful.
Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked.
'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.
If there was anything any Radchaai considered essential for civilised life, it was tea.
Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.
If you're going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.
Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.
Falling didn't bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It's stopping that's the problem.
I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.
Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
When I was a kid, I had no perception whatever that science fiction was supposed to be a boys' club.
When I'm writing, I don't really have much other guide than, 'As a reader, how would I respond to this?'
I'd say my biggest influences are writers like Andre Norton and, particularly when it comes to the Radch, C.J. Cherryh.
When one is the agent of order and civilisation in the universe, one doesn't stoop to negotiate. Especially with nonhumans.
Fortunately or unfortunately, NaNoWriMo requires you to write at a breakneck pace, so I got used to just pushing on through.
The Internet really lets people connect that wouldn't have in the past, and lets conversations happen and connections happen.
The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.
When I need to get away from my desk, I tend to take walks or go places. I also like to bead - working with beads to make jewellery.
I've been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.
I can't see potato chips being popular where there's not land to grow potatoes in or where frying in lots of oil isn't easy or convenient.
I do realize the impulse to classify people by the food and art they consume is strong - sometimes I have to remind myself not to do that.
I've always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along.
Singing together is something human beings just do, and there are hundreds of years worth of just European vocal music available to read and hear.
'Star Trek' still - I'm kind of intrigued by the way that the standard foods of various non-humans are sometimes portrayed as downright disgusting.
After about fourth grade, I do remember borrowing my mother's old portable Olivetti and typing stories out on the back of photocopies of journal articles.
The 'indistinguishable from magic' thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.
Does getting an award make you happy? When you imagine yourself at the ceremony, you're always so eloquent and gracious. In reality, it's kind of awkward.
I'm not going to pretend that I never fantasized about winning the Hugo. Or the Nebula, for that matter. I just never thought it was an actual real possibility.
Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.
The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.
I didn't ever imagine, except in the most idle, obviously wish-fulfillment, ego-gratification fantasies, that anything I wrote would ever win awards, let alone so many.
I'm one of those people who always wanted to be a writer, so I have a fair amount of juvenilia, though fortunately, I was too old for my juvenilia to be on the Internet.
Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.
I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings.
'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.
Junk food's not going anywhere. The specifics of what's being snacked on, and what's considered 'junk' and what's 'healthy' will change, of course, depending on what's available.
I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.
What would it be like to live 500 years? Healthy years, of course; no one wants to live 500 years in a coma on a respirator. But reasonably healthy all that time? That would be awesome!
Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?