Fantastika

The annotated Today in Alternate History

Meta, science fiction
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Y’all might be familiar with Today in Alternate History,
the weblog that explores what could’ve happened in small short news chunks. Now Michel Vuijlsteke,
of the excellent Belgian (Dutch language) weblog Tales of Drudgery
and Boredom, has produced The annotated Today in Alternate History, taking those entries and explaining them, frex:


1 August 1779: The Star-Dotted Heavens

Composer Francis Scott Key was born. After the birth of the North American Confederation,
he penned its national anthem, The Star-Dotted Heavens.

Francis Scott Key (1780-1843)
Lawyer and amateur poet. In the real world he wrote the words to The Star Spangled Banner after
the siege of Fort McHenry in 1814. Sung to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, it became the United
States’ national anthem in 1931. The actual “star spangled banner” that flew over McHenry now resides in the Smithsonian.

Behind the green door

science fiction
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On a somewhat lighter note, after the serious entries of the past week, this is the start of a thread on soc.history.what-if in which James Nicoll starts speculation about what would happen if the US in 1958 found a doorway in time to the Earth of 250,000,000 A.D.. This evidently fired the imagination of the posters there, as there is quite a lot of good, interesting speculation throughout the thread. Even though I like blogs quite a lot, Usenet still beats them when it comes to sustained discussion like this.

Related links:
The Epona Project, an attempt to create a believable extrasolar in detail.
One view of Earth 250,000,000 A.D.
The Future is Wild, the website of the tv series of
that name, which explored a similar issue. Heavy use of Flash.

Quickfire round

science fiction
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A quick round of sf links.

  • The online science fiction zine Infinity Plus has a new interview up with Christopher Priest (the UK sf
    writer, not the US comics writer). I just read his latest novel, The Separation, which I liked very much and which this interview is largely concerned with.
    Infinity Plus
    Christopher Priest interview
    The other Chris Priest
  • Also in Infinity Plus, an interview with Ted Chiang, short story writer extraordinary. He doesn’t write
    much, less than a story a year, but his stories are always excellent. They’re clever stories, both for
    their sf content as for their stylistic tricks and they feature believable characters.
    Interview with Ted Chiang
    (Both this and the above interview found via Sore Eyes.)
  • Meanwhile, as you have noticed, famed socialist Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has
    gotten a blog. Like his stories, it’s very politically orientated.
    The Early Days of a Better Nation
  • I found the following interview with Nicola Griffith while searching for something unrelated. Haven’t read any of her books yet, but the interview is still interesting. Not very up to date though, as it dates back to 1994. Explore the rest of the site too.
    Nicola Griffith
  • Finally, two Mary Gentle essays, one on worldbuilding and one on the attraction of villains and
    shop soiled heroes.
    Machiavelli, Marx And The Material Substratum
    Hunchbacks, Sadists, And Shop-Soiled Heroes