Over at Strange Horizons, someone likes Sensation, writing, in part:
Mamatas perfectly captures how humans are, simultaneously, weird and unpredictable and easily manipulated and stubborn and terrible and wonderful. But he also succeeds in creating a believable non-human intelligence, close enough as to go unnoticed among us, but different in every important way, with long-term motivations that are occasionally admirable and nearly always creepy. That some of the people out there in the world might not be, well, people seems upsettingly plausible within the world of Sensation. That's why it works, and works beautifully. Go read it.
Speaking of stories of parasitic manipulation, Dominica Phetteplace, an alumna of my class at the Writing Salon, makes her fiction debut this month in Asimov's, and the magazine has published her story online as well. Check out "The Cult of Whale Worship." (You might want to paste the text into a Word file and fix the indentations yourself though.)
And speaking of the Writing Salon, my next Berkeley call starts October 9. Nine weeks, Sunday evenings. Please consider signing up for it if you're local and interested in writing. No, there is no online version of the class, but there is an acynchronous home game/consultation module you can keep under your pillow.
Mamatas perfectly captures how humans are, simultaneously, weird and unpredictable and easily manipulated and stubborn and terrible and wonderful. But he also succeeds in creating a believable non-human intelligence, close enough as to go unnoticed among us, but different in every important way, with long-term motivations that are occasionally admirable and nearly always creepy. That some of the people out there in the world might not be, well, people seems upsettingly plausible within the world of Sensation. That's why it works, and works beautifully. Go read it.
Speaking of stories of parasitic manipulation, Dominica Phetteplace, an alumna of my class at the Writing Salon, makes her fiction debut this month in Asimov's, and the magazine has published her story online as well. Check out "The Cult of Whale Worship." (You might want to paste the text into a Word file and fix the indentations yourself though.)
And speaking of the Writing Salon, my next Berkeley call starts October 9. Nine weeks, Sunday evenings. Please consider signing up for it if you're local and interested in writing. No, there is no online version of the class, but there is an acynchronous home game/consultation module you can keep under your pillow.