Planetside Full Archives

This morning, I opted out of the Google Book Search Settlement.

For several months, I’ve had no question that I did NOT want my books included in Google’s database. It’s not the display of bibliographic information, or even snippets,…

Writers: The deadline for deciding whether to opt out of the Google Book Search Settlement is September 4, 2009. That means you have to decide today.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America has joined the Open Book Alliance, a coalition of librarians, legal scholars, authors, publishers and technology companies dedicated to countering the proposed Google Book Settlement.

Morphology is a fantasy and science fiction writer’s best friend. Seriously. Why? Because everyone uses it, and I mean everyone, whether they know it or not. Every story that makes up a name for a group of people and…

Our sister site, Nebulaawards.com, has an interview with Jeffrey Ford who was nominated for his short story “The Dreaming Wind.”

Whenever I think I’ve seen it all, something new comes along.

The explosive growth of self-publishing options over the past decade or so has spawned a mini-industry catering to writers trying to get notice for their books. From…

A beautiful, handcast commemorative pendant in the shape of an owl has been awarded to the 2009 Octavia E. Butler Scholar. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz received her pendant on July 31, at the party celebrating the conclusion of this year’s Clarion West…

Sometimes coming up with the right character name can be the hardest part. Whether working in secondary worlds or the real world, we have some research tools to make picking that perfect name a little easier.

Obscure math and astronomy texts. Arbitrary backlist policies. Member News about David Anthony Durham, Ken Scholes, N. K. Jemisin, and Victoria Janssen.

Do you need to have you own website? It depends on what you want to use the website for. Having an online presence may or may not translate to your desired action, in part because your presence really is about…

Articulatory phonetics deals with how the human vocal tract creates sounds. Knowing the principles of how the vocal tract works can help science fiction and fantasy writers to create languages that follow naturalistic patterns of pronunciation, thus making created languages that…

This sequence of “How ____ can help you!” pieces concerns various areas of linguistics. These aren’t intended to be technical, or even introductory discussions of linguistics itself. They are short, practical pieces which relate linguistics topics to the use of…

Congratulations to Edward Willet for winning the Aurora Award for the best long-form work of science fiction or fantasy by a Canadian writer in English in 2008. Mike Resnick is the newest Writers of the Future judge Celebrate Mary Shelley’s…

Traditionally, in the magazine and newspaper industry, a kill fee is “a negotiated payment on a magazine or newspaper article that is given to the freelancer if their assigned article is ‘killed’ or cancelled.” (Read the full definition here.)…

Research Tool: An online archive of vintage tools Market Update: If you’ve submitted to Strange Horizons from a gmail address, they’ve been having problems with responses vanishing. Jed Hartman has an update. Market Update: Asimov’s, Analog, Hitchcock’s, & Ellery Queen have…

The Washington Science Fiction Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction. Our congratulations to all the nominees, but we are particularly proud to see SFWA members K.D Wentworth, John Joseph…

This could be Science Fiction, but it isn’t. For the last twenty years, the US patent office has been issuing patents on human gene sequences.

We need twenty SFWA members to help us make calls to ensure that every member has current contact information.

The Convention Finder searches a database of cons based on location, making it easy to find the convention nearest you.

Our sister site, Nebulaawards.com, has an interview with Charles Coleman Finlay who was nominated for his novella “The Political Prisoner.”

As you may have noticed, the site is intermittently slow or returning server errors such as 500 server errors, configuration errors, etc. We have contacted the hosting company and it appears that another site on the same server is experiencing…

Gene Van Troyer (1950-2009) Gene Van Troyer, a science fiction writer and poet who worked as an English teacher in Japan, died July 17, 2009 of cancer. He was 58.