There’s a somewhat silly question (ok maybe not so silly for some) that pops up in writer’s interviews. And that’s the question of writer’s block. I’ve not used it in any of our author interviews but as an experiment I’ve put together a mini-Brain Parade on the topic:
Do you get “writer’s block”? And if so […]

It’s with quivering anticipating that I bring to you five steaming examples of prose most purple. It was with heavy hearts that we whittled the voluminous mountain of glittering submissions to this portentous content. The whole experience was a drama of Odysseian proportions that may have left us surprisingly unchanged for the rest of our […]

The Purple Planet contest to write the most appallingly cheesy opening paragraph to a science fiction, fantasy or horror novel is now closed. Thank-you to all those who entered, the standard has been execrable (but in a good way). Jose and myself shall be plowing through the entries some time over the next few days, and we hope to publish the winners next week.

Have you ever taken perverse pleasure in killing a character off in your writing? If so which one of your characters did you enjoy killing the most?

MT: Sorry for those of you who visited over the weekend only to find a huge gaping void of nothingness where memetherapy should have been. Unfortunately our host had a problem at their datacenter and the site was down for the whole of Sunday some of Saturday and some of Monday morning. However we’re back up now and normal service has been resumed.

There’s been talk of putting up Fiction on Meme Therapy. Right now it’s just late night living room murmurings. But as a warm up to a potential fiction stream here at Meme Therapy we’ve decided to showcase some truly awful writing. That’s where you, gentle reader, can help us out, by participating in our Purple Planet Writing Contest:

Today we cover odd facts that authors dig up when they’re researching stories. Here’s the question I posed to todays commentators:
What’s the oddest thing that you learned while researching a story?
Find out what weird factoids our pick of authors have discovered while researching for their books.

We stray from our Modus Operandi today with an interview with fantasy author Mark Chadbourn from the English midlands. One of his recent blog posts entitled Age of Heroes, where he talks about how the state of the world effects people’s tastes in genre fiction, caught my eye, as well as a few links to him from the SF&F blogosphere.

MTToday we interview Peter Watts, a Canadian science fiction author whose name popped up three times in our underrated writers Brain Parade a while back. His debut novel Starfish is one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read in the decade. I pestered Peter about his upcoming novel Blindsight.

It’s been a while since we’ve had some science ficiton related content on the blog but we’re making up for some lost time with an interview with young turk science fiction author and coolio blogger John Scalzi.

Today we get a head start on the week with an interview with science fiction author Mark Budz. I talk to him about science ficiton, writing, military robots and his latest novel Idolon.

Times are-a-changing, it wasn’t that long ago (four weeks in fact) when I probably couldn’t name a single Australian science fiction author. Now I’ve corresponded with two, the first is Russel Blackford and the second is Joel Shepherd who I’ve just interviewed.

Today we interview Keith Brooke the British science fiction author behind Genetopia (link), Green Party candidate and the man behind curtain at Infinityplus.co.uk. I asked him a few questions about his work and his politics.

Hal Duncan is a Scottish writer author whose debut novel Vellum has been generating a lot of very good buzz lately. He was kind enough to oblige us an interview. Enjoy.

TodayI bring you the fruition of my latest bit of science fiction author pestering. My latest victim is american SF author Nick DiChario. Nick has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, and two Hugo Awards. His first novel, A SMALL AND REMARKABLE LIFE has just come out.

Lest you think we’ve forgotten that we blog about speculative fiction as well as speculative politics I bring you an interview with science fiction author Adam Roberts. I asked him a few questions about his latest novel Gradisil and his writing in general.

We wrap up a heavy week of blogging with Chris Roberson a young turk who has been making waves with Paragea a new SF novel that’s getting quite a buzz on the SF blogosphere. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get my hot little hands on a copy on this side of the Atlantic yet but I’m a big fan of pulp and Chris Roberson is at the forefront of what seems to be a resurgence of 21st century pulp action in SF.

‘ve interviewed a number of transhumanists here over the past few weeks. Today I bring you an interview with Paul Hughes (no related to Dr. J Hughes) the editor of Future Hi. Paul is a pscyhedelic transhumanist, part of a movement that combines elements of spirituality, pschedelic culture and transhumanist thought.

Today we do some more reminiscing (we’ll get more intellectual later honest) with a Brain Parade that basicaly gives us another opening to talk about our favourite books. Here’s today’s question:

What’s your favourite death scene in a science fiction story?

Today we pick David Louis Edelman’s brains. He’s the author of the brand spanking new novel Infoquake (link) an active blogger who maintains his own blog (link) and also has his fingerprints on Deepgenre (link) and SFnovelists (link)

You’ve probably noticed that blogging Canadian SF writers are overepresented here. Well that trend continues. Today I bring you Mark Rayner a hilarious blogger and new kid on the block in the Canadian SF scene. His debut novel is Amadeus Net, you can read more about it here (link) Here’s our exchange:

We kick the week off with a chat with Robert Charles Wilson author of Spin.

MTHow is work coming along on Axis? I realize its probably too early to ask you about it, but… Can you tell us anything about it?

John Shirley is the author of numerous novels and books of stories, including the novels Cellars, Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin’ , Eclipse, A Splendid Chaos, the collection Black Butterflies (which won the Bram Stoker award and which was chosen by PW as one of the best books of that year), and the collection Really Really Really Really Weird Stories from Nightshade.

Today we take a different tack and interview an editor rather than a writer on the subject of science fiction. John has his fingers in a lot of different pies, he’s assistant editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction

As promised I’m following up on reader feedback from our Brain Parade on Underrated Science Fiction writers (link). One of our readers nominated Susan, I’d credit him here with a link but he commented anymonously. Susan was gracious enough to submit to a few pesky questions about her work

We kick the week off with an interview with Jeffrey A. Carver. Jeff’s novel The Infinity Link was the first science fiction hardcover I ever owned so this interview was something of a treat for me. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work and his take on the writing life.

We kick the week off with an interview with fellow Canadian Robert J. Sawyer. Rob writes hard sf that likes to tackle big philosophical questions. He’s a Hugo and a Nebula award winner and I don’t doubt that readers in Canada and the United States are already familiar with him. I am suprised at the number of Brits who haven’t though.

Sorry for the lack of content for the past 48 hours (and the lack of images) but blogger has been playing silly bugger. However I’m making up good today with an ace interview with Rudy Rucker. Rudy has always taken his writing into some very interesting directions. To get a taste of it I strongly reccomend that you check out his photo heavy blog