The Eagle Has Landed

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Look what just came in! Neil Clarke, who has a solid reputation for doing interesting things with Clarkesworld, has assembled an anthology of Lunar science fiction written since human beings first set foot on the Moon. The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction is a very cool project and I'm glad to be a part of it.

Here's the interesting thing, though. In his introduction, Neil notes that "one of the big consequences of landing on the Moon would be that science fiction would run away from it... The Moon was considered too close to the news and no longer fertile science fiction territory.

With a few rare exceptions, it would be twenty years before SF writers felt comfortable again setting stories on the Moon.

(When I read that, I thought surely my novella "Griffin's Egg," included in the anthology had been written within that two-decade dead zone. But checking the copyright, I see that, nope, it was published in 1991, 22 years after.)

Science fiction has had a long and tangled relationship with scientific discovery. Somebody should write an article tracing its broad outlines. Not me, however. I'm overcommitted.


And meanwhile, in the Image Book . . .

This rather lovely outline of a woman's face was not drawn but created by cutting away all the rest of the face from a magazine illo, almost certainly an advertisement for makeup or jewelry or such.

But I like the quiet quality of it, the near serenity, and the touch of mystery.


And tomorrow . . .

I've put together a list of all the characters, place names, races, and odd words in the Iron Dragon books.There are, it turns out, rather a lot of them. Tune in tomorrow and see.


Above: For those who came in late, as a way of drawing attention to my newly-published novel, I've been serializing the Image Book I put together as a way of helping me to visualize Faerie and its inhabitants. 

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