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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dkolodji | |
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Deborah P Kolodji, Nancy Ellis Taylor, Kendall Evans, W. Gregory Stewart
Today's poetry panel at Loscon was a fantastic session of speculative poetry, despite the fact one of our panelists, Denise Dumars, was unable to attend. Fortunately, Nancy Ellis Taylor was available to step in. After a blurb about the Science Fiction Poetry Association, we started with a quick round of introductions. Each of us talked a little about why we wrote speculative poetry and read one of our poems. I read "Lake Vostok" from Mythic Delirium. Greg read "in requieum "Turdius magatorious propinquus," Nancy recited "Zombie Girl in Love" from Star*Line and another short poem, and Kendall read "In Wicked Hollows on Darkling Plains," a collaboration with David C. Kopaska-Merkel from Asimov's Science Fiction and the 2007 Rhysling Anthology. Then, we had a poetry writing exercise that riffed off the convention theme - "But wait...there's more!" Together with audience participants, we generated a list of things we thought might complete a sentence which started with the theme. I took an idea from the local haiku workshop and had everyone close their eyes as I read this back to them: But wait, there's more spaceships, more asteroids, more alien languages. But wait, there's more unexpected flashes of light, more things falling in the swamp, more vines creeping out, more gremlins in the bushes. But wait, there's more ways to go to Mars, more zombies, more sequined bat wings. We gave everyone fifteen minutes to write a poem using one or more of the elements we came up with. It was fun to hear what everyone came up with! I urged everyone to polish them a bit and send them out. This led into a discussion of speculative poetry markets, including questions on submission procedures, how to find markets, etc. We also fielded questions about poetry critique groups and workshops, and talked about some of our the Southland Poets of the Fantastic workshops. Before we knew it, Loscon volunteers were holding up a "5 minute" warning sign in the back of the room and our time was up.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) sf_biology_blog | |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BiologyInScienceFiction/~3/bi_XFHal25I/silurian-tales.html  "Here about the beach I wander, Nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, And the long results of time." - Alfred Tennyson The Silurian Period of the Paleozoic Era featured coral reefs in shallow seas, and abundant life - jawless fish, sea scorpions, nautiloid cephalopods, trilobites and other creatures - inhabited the oceans. Plants - mostly mosses - were just emerging onto dry land. What would it be like if we could travel back to that time? Steven Utley has written a series of time travel stories featuring scientists exploring the Silurian era. As he explained in an interview: The stories in Silurian Tales span 25 to 40 years in the lives of a number of recurring characters, scientists and other visitors to mid-Paleozoic time, who are trying to do the work that is important to them while coping — or failing to cope — with isolation, boredom, privation, their own and one another’s shortcomings, and the implications of so-called time travel in accordance with the many-universes hypothesis advanced by quantum physicists. It is, in short, a book of stories about folks trying to be happy. Over the years Utley has read extensively to provide background for his stories: The last time Utley calculated the number of books and magazine articles he’s consulted for the series, it was over a hundred. "Including the Atlas of the Prehistoric World, Wildlife of Gondwana, John G. Maisey’s Discovering Fossil Fishes, works by David Attenborough, John McPhee, books about plate tectonics and oceanography, back numbers of National Geographic," Utley said. "I got off into astronomy and quantum physics, too. Everything became grist for the mill. Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy proved useful in writing some of the stories, so, too, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and throughout you’ll catch me paying homage, consciously or otherwise, to all sorts of authors besides Wharton — Jane Austen, Edmond Hamilton, H. P. Lovecraft, Conrad, Borges, Proust. Zane Grey, of all people: his description of a canyon in Riders of the Purple Sage or Heritage of the Desert somehow informs my sense of a Paleozoic landscape. [...] While an anthology is supposedly in the works, it doesn't appear to have been published yet. Fortunately, several of Utley's Silurian tales are free to read online: Image: Asaphus species (Trilobite) from the Ordovician-age strata near St. Petersburg, Russia.
Tags:science fiction, paleontology
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ahmedakhan | |
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THE YEAR I WAS BORN: • Fidel Castro became the Prime Minister of Cuba after deposing Batista. • Two chimpanzees launched by NASA were the first animals in space to return back safely to earth. • The first photocopier – the Xerox 914 – was put on the market.
WHEN I WAS ONE: • Theodore Maiman invented the first laser. • Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mocking Bird” is launched. • Concorde made its first supersonic flight.
WHEN I WAS TWO: • USSR put the first man in space.
WHEN I WAS FOUR: • USSR put the first woman in space.
WHEN I WAS SIX: • Malcolm X was assassinated.
WHEN I WAS SEVEN: • First Star Trek episode was broadcast. • Marshall Nirenberg and Har Khurana deciphered the DNA.
WHEN I WAS EIGHT: • Israel seized the Gaza strip. • First domestic microwave was launched by Amana.
WHEN I WAS NINE: • Martin Luther King was assassinated. • The crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit around the moon.
WHEN I WAS TEN: • Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. Tags: history
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