Tag Archives: book reviews

New Features on “Powered By Robots”

robot features

Image found on the http://brutalgamer.com website – no image credit listed

I’ve mentioned this in recent days, but for anyone surfing in who might not know, it would be easy to miss the menu button to the center-left of any page on my blog (three horizontal lines in a dark box), which allows a visitor to see what else is offered here on “Powered by Robots” besides a series of short stories and commentaries.

Click on the menu button, and the entire left side of the page expands revealing the menu.

The Home, About, and Contact pages are pretty standard with most blogs, WordPress and otherwise, but I’d like to highlight two recent additions.

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Dabbling in Science Fiction Fandom

sf convention

Photo credit – Knoxville News – Science Fiction convention – place and date unknown

In recent comments on the File 770 SF/F news blog criticizing veteran SF writer Robert Silverberg over comments he made about author NK Jemisin’s Hugo Award acceptance speech last summer, one of the things mentioned is that Silverberg hasn’t read any SF stories written in the past ten years, like that’s a bad thing.

In comments I made on twitter last summer criticizing the objectivity of the Hugo Awards, one person accused me of not being “a fan,” as if being a fan were some sort of exalted and coveted position.

But as I continued to gather information about the Hugos and how one is nominated for an award, I realized that although the pool of voters each year is relatively small (I’d estimate anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand), probably all of them are avid SF/F readers and viewers who consume tons and tons of the latest available works. I guess that’s what my critic meant when she said I wasn’t a fan.

But wait a minute. How much SF/F do I read?

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