One Sentence – Animated
• Avatar’s narrative was by no measure groundbreaking. But despite this, it appears that there are some spooky parallels between James Cameron’s futuristic setting and that of the Strugatsky brothers in their seminal science fiction series Noon Universe…
• Tolstoy gets upgraded: ‘Small US publisher Quirk Books, which had an unexpected hit with the Bennet-sisters-plus-zombies mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, will publish Android Karenina in June in the US and the UK to mark the centenary of Tolstoy’s death. Like its predecessor, it will intersperse the original text of the novel with science fiction action to create “an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel”’.
• Stick within one genre and the fans love you. But you’ll be a sellout. Sprinkle your work across a wide range of different styles and you get to keep your artistic integrity – but you won’t have built yourself a fan base. It’s a lose-lose situation…
• Sookie Stackhouse author Charlaine Harris talks about blood, love and vampires in this revealing interview.
• RIP Miep Gies, last living link to Anne Frank…
• Seven lost books that could have changed the course of the world…
• “Woman Married To Fat, Emotionally Distant Vampire Escapes Into ‘Twilight’ Novels”
• Probably the strangest headline you’ll read all Friday: “French novelists at war over the ‘theft of a dead baby’.”
• Everyone has heard of the so-called “Death of the Author”. But what does it really mean?
• What happens when authors can’t tell the time?
Beware the author of whose work your favourite is the first one you read…this is one of the comments in the attached post referred to here as “fans love you”. I would have to put as one of my favourite books Bryce Courtenay’s “Power of One” – it was such a fantastic tale. But it was the first of his books that I read, and everything else, save for “Recipe for Dreaming” and “April Fool’s Day” has had the same elements and, while I did read several others, in the end they became ho-hum for me and definitely without the mesmerising power of my first. So I would have to agree with this concluding remark. Ben Elton, on the other hand, one of my favourite authors, has a similar narrative style but each book is about a new subject matter and it keeps me coming back time and again.