Heard Round the Web

On her blog, science fiction author Nancy Kress discusses, "The Point of Fiction." She opinions, "It is: to decide what matters. Fiction explores this point through all sorts of subsidiary questions: What is worth expending effort on, struggling to obtain, sacrificing other things for, maybe even dying for?"

I am interested in this, and in how it can be applied to the specific Point of Science Fiction.

Meanwhile, Of Blog of the Fallen asks "Do SF/F authors have to be SF/F fans in order to be good writers?" Lots of interesting comments, and lots of names you may recognize in the comments as well - including Solaris book's Mark Newton and The First Law trilogy scribe Joe Abercrombie. My own opinion, expressed a few times already therein, that while there is no point reinventing the wheel, a good book is its own justification. And a bad book, well...

Finally, speaking of Joe Abercrombie, here he is speaking to SFX. A sample, from his advice to writers: "The best thing I've found, if you're not writing anything good, is just to sit in front of it and write something bad. Put in some chair time. Then when you come back later in a better frame of mind, you may find some gems in the rubbish you produced. You may even find what you wrote isn't that bad, and with a bit of sharpening up you have pure gold...”