26 May 09

SF Books for People Who Don't Like SF/F

retroblique:

Despite Hollywood’s best efforts to persuade you otherwise, genre fiction isn’t all about spaceships, robots, elves and wizards. It’s about the expression of ideas and concepts too broad to be contained by the rules, regulations and boundaries of our known experience.

Here’s a list of some of my favourite works of speculative fiction that should appeal to the more literary minded reader:

  • The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Separation by Christopher Priest
  • The Bridge by Iain Banks
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  • In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
  • The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • The Scar by China Mieville
  • The Owl Service by Alan Garner
  • The Children of Men by P. D. James
  • The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
  • The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanti Laski
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  • Sacrament by Clive Barker
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • Automated Alice by Jeff Noon
  • The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  • Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
  • The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
15 May 09
if you’re a middle-aged game-maker and you’re going to see Children of Men on the weekend with your wife and kids and getting your mind blown, you hit a point where you want to do something better, more important, than making blood flow realistically.
— Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer’s Programming Online Games - Esquire
15 May 09
The time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— Anais Nin
08 May 09
A father’s active, aggressive play, surprisingly, ends up teaching children how to control their emotions and cool down. If the children get out of control, if anyone starts to bite or kick, fathers usually end the game.
— Fathers hold equal, crucial role in parenting: Comment | adn.com
01 May 09

help with our site

We run a website that does video game reviews. We’d like to be able to get my reviews listed in various ways. So far, with our category system built into WordPress, we can only show one category at a time, like this: http://theportablegamer.com/reviews-quicklist/ or like this: http://theportablegamer.com/category/reviews/
. We’d like to be able to sort by categories, and provide the visual quality that can be seen on pages like this: http://theportablegamer.com/category/reviews/

We’d like a system that allows us to list our reviews by platform, and our platforms by type of content (news/reviews/features/audio/video).

We’d like it to be a widget in Word Press so that we don’t have to ask our writers to do even more than they’re already doing. If there is already an off-the-shelf plugin for this, We’d like to go with it. We just haven’t found it, yet.
18 Mar 09
It’s very possible that the meaning I derive from these images is quite different from the meaning others derive, and I’m not prepared to accept the idea that this difference is proof of my enlightened social consciousness versus someone else’s ignorance or self-delusion.
— Michael Abbot, The Brainy Gamer
18 Feb 09
This is the art of storytelling, you see. Telling small lies in pursuit of a larger truth.
— Patrick Rothfuss - Blog
01 Feb 09
likes Evolution of Dance on @boxee. check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg →
01 Feb 09
likes String Cheese Incident on Austin City Limits on @boxee. check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCODxHMwuEo →
27 Jan 09
At first I thought to do Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”, but never got really excited by that. Then I thought to translate a poem, but Michael cornered the market and I wanted to contribute something original. Thankfully, after playing Bioshock, discussing Rand’s inanity, and trying to read “Anthem”, I remembered The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
— show & tell