Chicon 8, the 80th World Science Fiction Convention, will be held in Chicago from September 1 to 5, 2022.

I’ll be there. In fact, I’m already doing a little volunteer work for the convention, helping edit the Progress Reports. Progress Report 3 is just out (PDF here), and I have an article in it about Chicon 8’s logo, the rocket that will “take it to the stars.” The logo is based on the Chicago city flag.

Progress Report 3 also includes a report about the first Worldcon in 1939, an article about fandom, a report from the convention chair, and news about the Art Show, Dealers’ Room, Exhibits, Hospitality, Member Services, and Programming. If you’re not sure if you want to attend, this might tempt you. Exciting things are in the works!

As Convention Chair Helen Montgomery puts it: “We really cannot wait to bring you all to Chicago, to show off our city and our fandoms, and to share our love of science fiction and fantasy together. Help us make our dreams, and yours, reality.”

I also have an article in Progress Report 2 (PDF here) about the Chicago city flag. Each of the four stars on the flag represents an important event in the city’s history.

As I said, I’ll be at Chicon 8. I plan to hop on a bus in front of my house, hop off the bus twenty minutes later, and be ready for five days of fun and inspiration with thousands of fellow writers and fans.

The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you want to write a novel, The First Five Pages should be helpful, although with a couple of minor caveats.

The book starts at the sentence level and carefully considers individual word choices, offering both basic and sophisticated advice. For example, comparisons slow down a text — which can be good or bad, depending on the pacing the author needs.

The second half of the book looks at “big picture” concerns like pacing, setting, and characterization. These can raise a novel from good to great. Some of Lukeman’s lessons might be familiar but reminders won’t hurt, and other lessons might be new and necessary.

Two caveats: First, the opening chapter, Presentation, is laughably out of date. Submissions are electronic these days, via email or website, and would-be authors need advice for how to handle those formats, not warnings about dot-matrix printers. Second, the examples of what not to do are so over-the-top bad that they rarely teach the would-be writer very much.

Beyond that, which are small problems, I think the book is worth the investment of money and time. Noah Lukeman knows that writing is hard, and he offers not just good advice but consistent encouragement.




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Time Waits For No One: The Chronocar Chronicles by Steve Bellinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Steve Bellinger takes the time travel paradox seriously. Time Waits for No One is the sequel to The Chronocar, which won several awards. In The Chronocar, a young black man in Chicago, Tony Carpenter, builds a time-travel machine and goes back to 1919, where things go deadly wrong. That was the year of the “Red Summer” riots by white supremacists.

In the sequel, Tony is time traveling again, a different Tony in a different timeline, and things go wrong in a different and even more deadly way.

The story moves fast, with both serious and funny moments, but eventually Tony has to take responsibility for catastrophes that he might not be able to solve. As with The Chronocar, I especially recommend this book to YA readers.

Oh, and about halfway through the book, the Earth is destroyed. I always enjoy it when that happens in a story. But this is time travel, so maybe the Earth can be rescued…


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“The motherhood statement,” according to the Turkey City Lexicon, “affirms the conventional social and humanistic pieties, i.e. apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to ‘deliberately burn the motherhood statement.’”

This is my attempt to burn the motherhood statement. It was originally published in Thema, Paper Tigers anthology, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2003.

***

The mosquito landed on the woman’s arm, she slapped it, and it fell dead. But nothing happens so easily.

She had watched it hover, tiger-striped. It landed on insubstantial legs, delicate as a fairy queen. Only females sought blood, and after a blood meal it could lay eggs. The woman considered granting its wish. Even tiny lives mattered.

But she couldn’t. The mosquito might carry a disease — not that it would care, even if it could understand. Its eggs mattered more to it than any human life. Mercy did not fit into the equation for either of them. The woman was pregnant. She had a life to protect, too. She slapped, and the mosquito fell, its long striped legs crushed and tangled.

And yet, she knew that with trillions of mosquitos and billions of humans in the world, this single killing accomplished almost nothing. It proved nothing, not even who loved their babies more. She had the brute advantage this time and she took it, that was all. Next time, who knew?

She eyed the tiny corpse on the ground. Only fools believed that motherhood meant tenderness. Motherhood meant menace. Motherhood made enemies. Mothers would stop at nothing. And she hadn’t even given birth yet.

© Sue Burke 2003

The term cultural appropriation has a few definitions, but all contain the idea of members of one culture using elements of another culture, particularly the exploitation and distortion of those elements. Among the ways to misappropriate a culture, you might err because you don’t fully understand that culture, even if you’re sure you do.

Here’s an example. When I was living in Spain, I belonged to an English-language writers critique group, and members came from a variety of countries. For some of them, the United States was a far-off, exotic land, and occasionally they tried to write stories and poems set there. Sometimes they failed spectacularly.

A little background: I was born and grew up in the United States. My father, shown in the photo, played on Marquette University’s football team. Wherever you’re from, you probably know that the sport called “football” in most of the world and “soccer” in the United States is very different from the sport we call “football” in the United States, even though they share historic roots. I’m a casual fan of American-style gridiron football, and I know a few things about it.

One day, an Irish author in our critique group submitted the start of a novel with this conflict: a young man in Chicago wants to play college football, but his father disapproves of anything that would detract from his studies for medical school, so the young man hides his participation in the Northwestern University football team.

The author was a big fan of soccer, and he assumed that American gridiron football would be similar. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

To start with, the author did not understand how hard, how treasured, and how public a spot on Northwestern’s team is. In fact, it’s a Big Ten team, the stuff of legend. Player recruitment involves years of preparation, the whole family, scholarships, sometimes lawyers and agents, and very often intense media attention.

After one game in which the young man in the novel makes a key play, he’s worried his father might find out about his deception, but, he reasons, no one pays much attention to college sports; apparently college sports don’t get much attention in Ireland. In fact, Northwestern games are televised live and covered by the news media in excruciating detail.

In one scene, the player talks to the coach, an underpaid, unimportant man who works out of a grim, tiny office in a basement corner of the school gym. In fact, the Northwestern football program is located in a fieldhouse that could be described as palatial. The current coach, Pat Fitzgerald, reportedly earns $5 million per year and could be described as fairly well known.

The coach orders the young man to “get kitted up and go out on the pitch.” In fact, American football is played in what we call uniforms and on what we call a field.

In one game, the play is described as moving fluidly up and down the pitch, now advancing, now protecting the goal. In fact, American football has been described as controlled violence interrupted by frequent committee meetings (huddles), very stop-and-start, and there are separate offensive and defensive teams as well as special teams.

Clearly, our author had never seen an American football game, but it’s a lot like soccer, right?

I tried to be gentle as I advised the author to abandon his novel. He would never be able to do enough research from his home in Spain to get the details right.

Cultures are complex. It’s easy to blunder. If you want to write about something from another culture, perhaps you can successfully, but the first step is understanding the other culture and yourself. American football is tough enough to withstand a lot of misappropriation. The elements of some other cultures might be fragile and should be approached with care and respect. In fact, you might even discover that you aren’t the right author for that story.

Even though I live in Chicago now and I’ve known some real-life American football players, I’m not qualified to write a novel about a member of the Northwestern University football team. I know more than enough about American football and Northwestern to understand how very little I actually know.