I’ve covered some interesting topics over the last week about results from our March Survey. I’m not going to go over them now. It’s Friday, and I want to present you with something that is kind of fun.
So, with no further ado, and minimum commentary from me, I present you with your favorite science fiction subgenres. Happy Friday!
The top subgenres: Aliens, Robots, Post-Apocalyptic, and Dystopian (Click to see a larger image)
My personal favorites, though I really do like all of them, are military sci-fi/space opera (kind of a tie, I guess), robots, pulp, retro futurism, and comedy.
Didn’t get a chance to tell us your favorites? Tell us now. Leave a comment below.
Yesterday evening, I talked about how many of you would consider subscribing to Interstellar Fiction. Today’s March results post is actually kind of related to that. One of the other questions we asked you if you would purchase an end-of-the-year anthology. The results of your responses are below.
The day is still young, and I thought that I’d throw in one more of our many results for you today. This one’s short, so don’t worry. It’ll be over before you know it.
One of the other questions we asked you in March is if you’d subscribe to receive the newest issues of Interstellar Fiction.
I have a feeling that you’re probably going to get tired of reading these posts before I get tired of writing them. I’ll apologize right now about that. It’s just we have a lot of information to get out to you.
We’ve covered a few topics already. I talked about where readers first heard about us on Thursday. On Friday I discussed that most of our readers also strongly feel that they’re writers. You got an information break over the weekend and Monday. And yesterday I talked a little about the visiting frequency and how our readers are really voracious readers.
As I mentioned yesterday, I want to change pace a little bit and explore some unrelated topics this week. Today I want to discuss a bit about our readers, social media, and friends.
We’ve covered two topics from the results of the March survey thus far. On Thursday, I discussed where most of our readers first heard about Interstellar Fiction. Nearly half of our readers found us via a writer’s market. Then on Friday I talked about how that makes sense because most of our readers strongly feel that they are also writers.
This week I’d like to change course a little bit and cover a few unrelated topics. Today we’re going to take a little peek at our readers’ visiting frequency.
I suppose there are only two real questions that you need to ask yourself to know if you’re going to like Red Planet Blues. 1) Do you like pulpy detective stories? 2) Do you like science fiction?
Yesterday I may have mentioned something about how many of you found us via a writer’s market and that it could possibly mean something. It does. We asked our readers on a scale of one to five how much they also feel like they are writers. Here are the results from those seventeen responses.
It’s been a little over a week since the March survey ended. Seventeen of our readers responded, and we’d really like to thank all of you who took your time to answer a few of our questions. If we could, we’d give each and everyone one of you a little kitten to hold and hug. But alas, we can’t do that. However, we can do the next best thing.
I posted this on my personal blog and have reproduced it here for your reading pleasure. Check it out:
A question that people often ask me is where I get my ideas. Personally, I think this is a stupid sentiment because it implies that I just pop down to Target and pick up a big bag of ideas.
This guy wishes he was clever enough to come up with this post’s title.
The truth is that I don’t think any creative person knows where they get their inspiration from. One minute, they’re staring off into space and the next they’re struck with the idea for their next great painting (or story or song or sculpture…).
But I also don’t believe that the Muses come down from their thrones on Olympus and bless the worthy with impulses to create. I think there’s a middle ground that creative forces occupy.
I would go so far to say that all creative endeavors are a reaction, either to real life, another creative endeavor, or a combination of the two. Every original concept is borrowed (stolen) from someplace else.
That isn’t to say that everything is plagiarized. In fact, the difference between the regular creative process and plagiarism is the fact that an artist admits that they are stealing from someplace else and hopes that (at least some of) the audience will recognize the roots of their creation, while a plagiarist hopes that the audience will not recognize the roots of their creation and that the work will be solely attributed to them.
The fact is that we are inspired by everything around us. Snippets of conversation heard on the subway. Opening lines of our favorite novels. Interactions taken out of context and at face value. Walks through the park on a sunny day.
The most surprising thing about this is not the fact that artists steal from their day to day lives. That is the least surprising bit of all and anybody with at least a couple of brain cells flickering in their skulls should realize that one. However, I can understand the fact that artists take from other artist can be startling.
The thing that many people fail to remember about the world is that everything is derivative. Everything is built upon everything else. While this rule applies heavily to art, it also governs science, technology, and politics. Because of the way we perceive time, that is the only way we can streamline things: by adapting and reapplying what we liked and what worked and what went well and discarding what didn’t. Though the effects of this concept are more tangible and visible in the sciences and humanities, the arts also abide by this law.
Look at the evolution of paintings: things went from Realism, where images where painted in an effort to capture how they were in everyday life, to Impressionism, where the impression of the object was the subject of a painting with less focus on the realistic form of the object, then Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, where the form of an object was distorted even more by the emotional lens of the painting, then to Cubism, an experimental art form made famous by the likes of Picasso where distortion was the main event, then to Surrealism and Dadaism, where shit just got weird.
This is only a fraction of the timeline of the evolution of one school of art, but the point remains: the painters all built off of one another’s work. There was a dialogue of art, with responses and attacks and homages flying back and from one another.
I guess there’s one thing to take away from this rant: only a fool chases the specter of an original idea because there is no such thing. Everything builds on everything else and scientists aren’t the only one who stand on the shoulders of giants.
In this month’s issue of Interstellar Fiction, we featured a story called Download, a great tale about the implications of cloning. While the story isn’t exactly grounded in hard science, I thought that I would take this opportunity to explore some of the real, scientific advances in this area. So how close are we to being able to clone a human being? Read more…
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