Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).
Yeahhhhhh this accurate (also I totally caught a guy at work today watching a video on his smartphone while pooping, and as a firm advocate of poop-reading, I still thought that was a pretty weird thing to do in a public bathroom in a professional environment)
I found this little gem on the Tor Books tumblr page, but it was too good not to share here as well.
Reading, man. That stuff'll mess you up.
This is Alyssa Wong — or as I like to call her, Death Cupcake. Don't let her seemingly adorable exterior deceive you (or do — she'd probably prefer it if you do, as it gives her the advantage when she swoops in to devour your soul): Alyssa is a wonderful, wonderful person who writes some of the most brutal stories I've encountered. Alyssa's stories, much like their creator, are a perfect marriage of cutesy moments and grotesque, gut-wrenching horror. This seemingly incongruous combination is precisely what makes her and her stories so wonderful.
But don't let my biased voice fool you. Take it from SF Site, who just interviewed Alyssa about The Fisher Queen, her first professional fiction publication. I had the pleasure of reading the first draft of The Fisher Queen at Clarion in the summer of 2013, and it's one of the stories that has stuck with me ever since. The best way I can describe it is as a Feminist Mermaid Horror story. If that sounds weird to, well, that's part of the charm of Alyssa's work — she can write a feminist mermaid horror story and actually pull it off. I was legitimately squirming by the end of this story.
Alyssa was one-third of the affectionately named "Team Tiny Bonesaw" at Clarion 2013, alongside Isabel Yap and Gabby Santiago
Again, don't take my word for it — you can download the entire story for free on Amazon in this exclusive sampler digest of Fantasy & Science Fiction
And lest I've frightened you too much, here's Alyssa posing with the UCSD Triton. She's get a weird thing for mer-people — but hey, I don't judge.
Because banning books has always ended well, and has never been held up as an eternal symbol of a corrupt society...
Cory himself explains it perfectly over at BoingBoing: "I don't think this is a problem because my book is the greatest novel ever written and the kids will all miss out by not reading it, but because I think that the role of an educator is to encourage critical thinking and debate, and that this is a totally inappropriate way to address 'controversial' material in schools."
I mean, I'm 28 now, and I still think this is a valid message.
Little Brother is an absolutely exhilarating young adult novel about teens fighting back against Big Brother. Most of us read 1984 in school (and other dystopian classic, such as Brave New World), but Little Brother arms readers with the necessary knowledge to fight back. Big Brother is watching you, all right — but who's keeping tabs on Big Brother? The book is set vaguely now-ish, and even reading it as an adult, it was both educational, and horrifying. I'm glad I read it after the Boston Marathon Bombings, or else I would have been even more freaked out during that situation, rather than being oblivious to the other real-life horrors of what was going on (the basic plot of the novel follows a teen named Marcus Yallow who skips school to go LARPing, which puts him in the wrong place during a terrorist attack and leads him into the torturous hands of the Department of Homeland Security). It's one of those books that I find myself recommending to absolutely everyone I meet, but especially to middle- and high school students.
Fortunately, when not writing fantastic science fiction books, Cory Doctorow is also an advocate for Internet freedoms and basic Civil Rights (plus a fantastic writing mentor). His publisher, Tor Books (to whom I also contribute, via Tor.com), has agreed to send 200 free paperback copies of the novel to students at Booker T. Washington High School. And on top of that, you can download Little Brother for free in a variety of different formats directly from Cory's website, where he offers all of his books for download under Creative Commons licensing (the idea being that people will download the book for free, like I did, then tell someone about it, like I just did, which then leads to someone buying it. And it works). Even the National Coalition Against Censorship has gotten involved, writing a good ol' fashioned "strongly worded letter" to the educational administration in Pensacola.
So download Little Brother (it's free! You have literally no excuse!), give it to your friends and younger cousins and siblings. Because a society that still bans books is not a good place to live.
This was enjoyable, but it took me longer to get through than it should have, because I didn't care enough. It's a fun concept, I like the world, but I wish it had either been funnier, or darker (for example, and this is a slight spoiler: if you have a co-worker who's a succubus and feeds on sexual energy, and he tries to seduce your character at a nightclub because he's hungry, and you DON'T find a way to make that a metaphor either for date rape, or a regrettable but consensual one night stand with a co-worker? C'mon! It's right there!). Instead, it was kind of a mediocre middle ground between monsters and tourism that was certainly fun, but nothing remarkable. I loved the idea of Public Works, and the zombies, and some of the characters were still fun (despite the fact that I have literally no idea what the protagonist looked like). By the time the epic ending came around, which I guess was kind of cool, I was more interested in finishing the book than I was in what actually happened to any of the characters (spoilers: they all live happily ever after. lame).
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
I have a confession to make. I didn't really bring t-shirts for everybody. Although I do have these sweet new business cards! So that's cool, right? I know I've been slacking (again) lately (again) with keeping this website updated with all of my various doin's. But it's not like I've not been not doing things (...or is it?)! Instead, I've just been too busy doing things to, ya know, write about doing things. It's kind of why I hate meetings in general, because I'd rather be doing things, than talking about doing things. So this website's kind of like a meeting then. Except I don't hate it; in fact, I quite love my little website here. So really, not like a meeting at all.
(shut up Thom) Okay so here's a brief rundown of where the hell I've been:
