1 of 1

Write now Article Tools

Edited by Dave A. Law and Darin Park (sorry, the name of the book was too big to include the editors into the title).

I received this book from EDGE/Tesseract, which is also in league with Dragon Moon Press, who happened to be the publisher of this particular book. On a side not to this, they also have a couple volumes of a guide to writing fantasy, which may be of interest to those of you who are not into SF.

I'm going to do this review in two ways. First I'm going to talk about the book as a whole, second I'm going to address each article individually, and third I'll end with a conclusion. Here goes:

This book should be on your required reading list for genre-related non-fiction. If you write science fiction, get this book because it will help you in so many different ways, especially if you're just starting out in the SF field. This book covers everything from the early history of SF to sub-genres, creating believable aliens to getting your science right, writing to editing, and submitting to the life of a published author. In a lot of ways it is too much subject matter for one book, but I imagine that Dragon Moon is intending to do with this what they did with their guide to fantasy-multiple volumes-which would help expand upon the ideas that were intentionally left alone. In short, this is one of the most useful books for writers of SF that I have read since Orson Scott Card's how-to book on SF & F. It's definitely worth more than the $24.95 USD price.
Edit: I forgot to mention that the back of the book includes an extensive collection of resources that I have found remarkably useful. It includes websites, publishers, and all of the works that were cited within the articles, among other things.
Now for the criticism, which is sort of bad criticism and simple observational criticism which is neutral. There were some articles that had spelling and grammar errors, though the vast majority of the book was generally perfect. Also, it seems as though there was a printing problem throughout the book that I can't imagine being an editorial issue. The italicized capped "N" was consistently replaced with an italicized capped "I" with a little dot under it. This has to be some sort of printing fluke. It's hard to miss otherwise. Other than that, and what will be mentioned in the individual article discussions, there little wrong with this guide. With authors like Orson Scott Card, Wil McCarthy, Piers Anthony, Michele Acker, and Kim Richards in the table of contents you

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Book reviews: The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction?
We want to hear your view. Write now!