SO LATE SO SOON: fun, genre-celebrating SF for young readers (of all ages!)
[Harry Tynan posts on our forums as Moose Malloy. Earlier this week, he messaged me about his fun, self-published kid's book, written as a series of bedtime stories for his kid (a tradition I'm very fond of -- it's the origin story of The Borribles!). The book is so much fun that I invited him to write a short introduction and choose a excerpt for your edification. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! -Cory]
The great Umberto Eco once wrote, in a marvellous essay about Casablanca, that "Two clichs make us laugh. A hundred clichs move us. For we sense dimly that the clichs are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."
And hey, who doesn't love Casablanca?
I'm no Umberto Eco, but a while back I wrote a science fiction novel out of love for my son and out of love for the SF genre itself. Freed by love, I poured my heart into this short tale of a boy and his dad (plus his two accidental, argumentative clones, plus his dad's childhood dog accidentally yanked forward from the 1970s for their own, very tail-waggy reunion).
For my son's amusement, I unselfconsciously stuffed each of my quick, cliff-hanging chapters with my favourite SF clichs from a lifetime of fandom. I smushed in some 'gritty history' and some light moral lessons and some Shakespeare and some counterfactual frolics. I had huge fun bashing out 500 words nightly on an old laptop after everyone else hit the hay. Read the restOriginal Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/np3ZvMim2GA/so-late-so-soon.html