{"id":8812,"date":"2019-04-17T11:41:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T19:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8812"},"modified":"2019-04-17T11:41:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T19:41:03","slug":"peter-watts-is-an-angry-sentient-tumor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8812","title":{"rendered":"Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor."},"content":{"rendered":"
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I especially like the “Slippery Surface” motif. Although “Thin Ice” might have been even better…<\/p><\/div>\n

So that’s the title they went with.<\/p>\n

My suggestion was simply “Revenge Fantasies”, but apparently in the #MeToo era such a phrase, in isolation, is too evocative of “revenge porn”. I believe the whole sentient tumor thing was originally coined by Analee Newitz.<\/p>\n

As titles go, I admit that it rocks.<\/p>\n

I’m surprised to be bringing this up so early. I don’t even know what the collection is going to contain\u2014 Tachyon gave me a ballpark word count and I sent them over twice that, leaving them to decide what makes the cut. But given its sudden appearance on Amazon<\/a> (complete with a handful of skill-testing questions), I guess I can talk about it.<\/p>\n

So here it is.<\/p>\n

Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and <\/strong>Essays<\/strong><\/p>\n

is pretty much what it sounds like. A few months back Tachyon<\/a>‘s Jacob Weisman pitched me the idea of an essay collection. My initial reaction was, I suspect, similar to yours: In God’s name, why<\/em>?\u00a0 My essays are already available; I’ve been writing them on this very ‘crawl for somewhere around 15 years now. I’ve been writing them for Nowa Fantastyka<\/em> over in Poland. I’ve even done occasional prestige gigs at places like Aeon and The Daily (generally when someone far hotter than me is struck with flesh-eating disease, and the media needs a memoir from someone who isn’t currently in a medically-induced coma). Hell, even my lectures are sprinkled online here and there.<\/p>\n

But apparently Freeze-Frame Revolution<\/em> continues to do well (so they tell me, anyway), and so did Beyond the Rift<\/em> in its day (which also packaged old wine in new bottles to good effect, now that I think of it). So Tachyon is interested in keeping me out there. And if John Scalzi can get away with anthologizing his blog posts, why not me? (I’m a lot less virtuous than Scalzi, of course. Hopefully at least some will regard that not as a bug, but a feature.)<\/p>\n

So now you know as much as I do: a collection of rants and essays, potentially ranging from climate change to colonoscopies to cats, but really, who knows? Amazon pigeonholes it under \u00a0“Science Essays & Commentary”, “Science Fiction & Fantasy Literary Criticism”, and “Science Fiction History & Criticism”. Tachyon pegs its length at 288 pages. You can combine a lot of different modules into a box that size; I’ve even asked them to leave open the possibility of including pieces I haven’t written yet. \u00a0Or even second-edition rewrites of older posts, to keep them current (anyone interested in my second-season take on Westworld<\/em>, now’s the time to speak up).<\/p>\n

Hell. If we get desperate you might read these words again in a year or so, posing as an Introduction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So that’s the title they went with. My suggestion was simply “Revenge Fantasies”, but apparently in the #MeToo era such a phrase, in isolation, is too evocative of “revenge porn”. I believe the whole sentient tumor thing was originally coined by Analee Newitz. As titles go, I admit that it rocks. I’m surprised to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8812"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8817,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8812\/revisions\/8817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}