Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about John’s new album Artificial Heart. Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Want You Gone.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “I Crush Everything.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Betty and Me.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Re: Your Brains.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Chiron Beta Prime.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Still Alive.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Skullcrusher Mountain.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “I’m Your Moon.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “Space Doggity.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[Read more]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM from now to May 29, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

Today John talks to Jon about “The Future Soon.” Audio and the chat transcript are below.

[The Future Soon]

Welcome to Journey to Planet JoCo, an interview series where science fiction and sometimes fantasy author John Scalzi talks to musician Jonathan Coulton about science fiction and science fiction songs.

Every morning at 9 AM, for the next two weeks, John will talk to Jonathan about one of JoCo’s songs, getting in-depth — and possibly out of his depth — about the inspiration and construction behind them. Which ones? You’ll have to come back every morning to see!

There’s more, but we’ll let John and Jonathan themselves further introduce the concept, the details, and the sparkly prize at the bottom of this particular cereal box.

[Read on]

I’m not gonna lie to you: I like Starship Troopers, the movie, and pretty much always have. I know many of you don’t. For those of you, I’m going to share my five secrets to enjoying Starship Troopers, the film, here in 2012.

[Five secrets...]

I have a story I like to tell about my first encounter with Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of the Wind. Pat knows which story this is, and he’s probably even now putting his hand to his forehead and thinking, “Oh God, not this story again,” but for the rest of you it might be new, so here goes.

In 2007 I was on tour for my novel The Last Colony, and at the Minneapolis stop, the folks at Uncle Hugos, where I was doing my signing, told me a new author had left behind a signed book for me. Then they proceeded to use a crane to drag out this monster of a book called The Name of the Wind. It was huge, we’re talking elk-stunning huge, and since I had everything for a three-week tour in a single carry on (if you give airlines dozens of chances to lose your luggage, they will), I had no place to pack the thing. I had to carry the thing around.

[Much ado about stew]

Following up on Jo Walton’s post on why Heinlein discussions frequently become acrimonious, I think there’s another reason why Heinlein today presents a challenge to current readers and critics, which is that his work is literature in transition—it’s in a middle ground between being contemporary work and being part of the background of the genre. Or, to put it another way, the problem with Heinlein right now is that he’s not quite Neal Stephenson, and he's not quite Jules Verne—he’s in a middle place, and that makes him and his work contentious.

Or, to put it in yet another way: Heinlein passed away 22 years ago, long enough ago that it’s reasonable to say that a majority of his readers under 35 never read him while he was still alive. To them, he’s always been history, and he’s always been, quite literally, less than vital to their understanding of the genre. The majority of his readers over 40, on the other hand, read him and were aware of him while he was still a lion of the literature—not just a Grand Master of the genre but the Grand Master, the first Grand Master, who while contentious and controversial as he may have been, was still someone to whom attention was to be paid.

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Every student of Heinlein knows that among the number of things he did during his career, one of the more significant events was selling four science fiction short stories to The Saturday Evening Post in the late 40s, thus becoming the first writer of the genre to graduate from “the pulps,” as the science fiction magazines of the time were known, to writing fiction for “the slicks,” the name for the higher-end, general interest magazines. And among those magazines the Post was at the top of the heap, having the highest circulation of any magazine in America at the time.

Why had Heinlein tried placing the story in a magazine that hadn’t published science fiction before? One obvious reason was for the money: The Saturday Evening post paid a multiple of what Heinlein could have earned from John Campbell and Astounding, and that of course was reason enough in itself, especially for a man who, as I noted in my earlier entry about Heinlein, wasn’t always flush with cash. Another reason was because Street & Smith, the publisher of Astounding, where Heinlein placed much of his fiction, had declared it was buying “all rights” to work it published, and Heinlein, who had an eye toward reprints and adaptations, refused to sell his work under such terms.

But Learning Curve points out another reason, which is of interest to me: Heinlein felt that there was a need to propagandize and popularize the idea of space travel and exploration, for a number of reasons, not a few related to the already-chilling cold war between the US and the Soviets. Writing for the pulps in that regard would be preaching to the converted; placing science fiction in the Post, on the other hand, would be putting it into the laps of people who had never read science fiction before, or who avoided it as something for the eggheads and misfits.

[Read more]

Hello, all:

I’m going to start off my contribution to this little online discussion of Heinlein by noting the gift this first volume of the Heinlein biography gave me, which is the ability to think of Robert Heinlein in terms of being a struggling writer, rather than Robert Heinlein, Grandmaster of science fiction.

This is no small feat. To give a little perspective on the matter, Robert Heinlein was given the Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America (now the Damon Knight Grand Master Award, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), back in 1975, when Heinlein was sixty-eight years old and I was six, and still years from my first encounter with his work—which was Farmer in the Sky, which I read in fourth grade.

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