Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Latest review of Muses & Musings

Excerpt from a review of my 2019 collection, Muses & Musings, upon which I just stumbled:

He is science fiction down to the bone, but he very often takes the "serious" stuff not so seriously. Or he does, but he still squeezes a modicum of wit and whimsy into his subjects. He can catch a salient point in a couple of pages or explore a well-trodden road like AI with new insight.

"He" and "him," in this context, being me.

The full review, for anyone curious, can be found at http://www.galaxysedge.com/. Once there (cuz the review page is for some reason not accessible via a direct link) click on "Recommended Books".

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Sherlock #3

Perhaps you met my AI PI in "A Case of Identity," in the December 2015 Analog. Maybe you encountered this futuristic detective in his second outing, "The Satellites of Damocles," in Future Science Fiction Digest 3 (June 2019).


Either way,  I expect you'll be happy to know that "Sherlock" confronts his third mystery in "The Adventure of the Meat Interpreter." That story just debuted in the January/February 2020 issue of The Grantville Gazette (in the zine's Universe Annex).

And if you aren't familiar with the two earlier stories in this series? No problemo. As with more conventional Sherlock stories, you can dive in at any point. 

It's a lovely way, IMO, to start the year. (For me, certainly, and I like to believe you; not so much for the eponymous interpreter.)

Friday, January 3, 2020

To everything there is a season ...

The new year, traditionally, is a time to take stock. And this being an SFnal blog, a certain Philip K. Dick quote comes to mind. To wit:

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

What reality should be recognized in this new year? That after more than eleven years and 655 posts, my enthusiasm for blogging has ebbed. That whereas my practice has long been to post more or less weekly, this schedule in recent months has -- being honest with myself -- too often been more of a chore than a joy. (Also, of late, a target increasingly missed.) Which, I'd venture to guess, doesn't always make for the most gripping material when I do post.

I'm not apt to stop altogether. Things I read, see, and think will, from time to time, doubtless inspire me to opine. And -- my most viewed posts, year after year, relating to my books, stories, and articles -- I anticipate that publication-centric news will appear here every now and again.

Bottom-lining it: you can expect SF and Nonsense to become less active than it's traditionally been and that, when I do post, my topic will often be promotional. At shorter lengths, and perhaps more often than here, I'll show up on Facebook (where my authorial page, unsurprisingly, is https://www.facebook.com/EdwardMLerner/); I invite you to follow my FB page. 

And who knows? Perhaps -- as in many a Philip K. Dick story -- reality will shift in unexpected ways, and the urge to blog will return.