Writing continues apace, which is nice, and I’m still enjoying the week I have before I had back to my other job on Saturday.
On the same note, I am taking things very easy this weekend. Since it is basically my last weekend off until who-knows-when, I’m trying to check-in with myself, make sure I’m happy with my progress.
As a result, I’ve been doing a fair number of writing. I just finished the short story collection Burning Chrome by William Gibson, as well as the short story Fermi and Frost by Frederick Pohl. These are both required readings for the course I’m taking (“Contemporary Science Fiction”), but it’s nice to do deep-dives on what really drives genre, or at least what drove genre.
I mean, I write sci-fi. I know I write sci-fi, but I write very soft sci-fi without too much analysis of the hard numbers and science (although I do dabble with that occasionally… I have a few paragraphs that are pretty number-crunchy in Tintian and the King’s Claw, although I have tried to avoid too much in my more recent novels). But if I wanted to write a cyberpunk novel… could I? There is a whole discussion about whether cyberpunk still exists, for one thing (since the ‘worst case’ of many of them are now in the distant past and we are sailing towards brand-new ‘worst cases’). What about a Humanist or Solarpunk? It’s interesting to think about, even if the novels I’m working on at the moment don’t fit into those subgenres.
Anyway! Hope everyone is having a great Monday, and is staying safe and healthy!