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Blog postAt last... the cover art for STRANGE STARS has been revealed. It's my upcoming book from Melville House which will trace science fiction's influence on the music of the '70s, from David Bowie to Rush to Parliament to Devo to Gary Numan -- and everything in between! The book comes out June 5, 2018, and here's the preorder link!
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Blog postI'm supremely ecstatic to announce that my book STRANGE STARS--about David Bowie and how science fiction influenced popular music in the '70s--will be published by Melville House (distributed by Random House). Along with Bowie, Strange Stars will cover everything from Hawkwind to Parliament-Funkadelic to Blue Oyster Cult to Devo to Yes to Gary Numan to Jefferson Starship to X-Ray Spex to T. Rex to Rush to krautrock to space disco. I can't disclose the publication date quite yet, but I assure you
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Blog postThis year I slept in Neil Gaiman's attic.
That's not all I did, of course, but it's the thing that stands out the most in my mind as I peer back through the shrouded mists (or is that the misted shrouds?) of the past twelve months. But allow me to explain: This summer I was one of eight participants in a speculative-fiction-writing workshop called Wyrd Words, and it took place at Neil Gaiman's house deep in the wilds of Wisconsin. I won't elaborate on it too much, but I will say thi -
Blog postI just got my copy of Bob Rob Medina's new book, Denvoid and the Cowtown Punks. It's fucking amazing. Bob Rob conducted tons of interviews with people from the Denver punk scene of the '80s then added lots of his own incredible artwork, which makes the whole thing super vivid and eye-popping. Of course, there are also photos, flyers, and other bits of archival stuff sprinkled throughout. Bob Rob published this book himself, and it's such a labor of love, passion practically drips off the pa
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Blog postDISCLAIMER: This post is NOT about the recent Hugo Awards kerfuffle, nor this weekend's results of said awards. There are plenty of people out there doing an admirable job at covering and commenting on that. Cool? Cool.
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Last month a dear colleague of mine, someone I hold in extremely high esteem as both a person and a writing industry professional, said to me ever-so-slightly slyly, "You're going to the first Hugo winner to write a Goosebumps book."
That person wa -
Blog postI just finished the first draft of my new novel! And as I usual do when working on a book, I listened to a lot of music while writing it. But this novel is a little different: Music is one of its central components.
More specifically, the book takes place in the punk scene in 1994, and each chapter is named after a punk/hardcore/post-hardcore/emo song that was released between '90 and '94 on an independent label (even if some of the bands later moved to a major--and even if some of these s -
Blog postI'll be attending Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts, from July 9-12! This is my second time at Readercon, and the first time I'll be on programming (not counting the last-minute Sybil's Garage reading I participated in back in '09, thanks to my magnanimous editor Matthew Kressel).
This year I'll be on one panel, and it's on Friday, July 10 at 1 p.m., and the topic is: "It's Actually About Ethics: Reviewing the Work of Colleagues and Friends." My fellow panelists will -
Blog postHuman beings frighten and confuse me, so I don't go out much these days. But I'm happy to make an exception tonight for MILE HIGH SOUL CLUB. I'll be the guest DJ tonight, and I'll be bringing my box of soul 45s, and I'll be playing them while I watch you dance. Does that sound creepy? Because it kind of is. Most of human existence is sort of sickeningly absurd, when you think about it. Thankfully there's soul music to help distract us from our own frightening, confusing selves. FUCKIN
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Blog postThe schedule for this year's AnomalyCon -- Denver's big steampunk convention -- just went up. I'm on a whopping SEVEN panels, including a couple with Cory Doctorow and a few with my friends S. J. Chambers, Carrie Vaughn, and Molly Tanzer. My schedule is below (subject to eleventh-hour tweaks, of course). The con goes down March 27-19 at the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center. See you there?
FRIDAY 3/277pm: Ancient CivilizationsFrom the very ancient to the near modern, history has a way of ro -
Blog postEdith: The Smiths
Barrow: Death in June
Tom: Billy Bragg
Lady Mary: Siouxsie and the Banshees
Rose: The Style Council
Daisy: Bow Wow Wow
Lord Grantham: Cliff Richard
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Blog postFor the past few months, my old friend Frank Romero (co-founder of Denver Comic Con) and I have been curating and hosting SCIENCE FRICTION, a monthly science fiction film series at Alamo Drafthouse Denver. It's done so well, we're branching off into a second monthly series: FANTASTIQUE. The new series will be all fantasy, and it will go down on the first Thursday of every month at Alamo.
We're launching Fantastique on April 2, and we had to kick things off with one of our favorite f -
Blog postFarrago's Wainscot--one of the most progressive and adventurous weird-fiction publications in recent memory--is back. And I'm lucky enough to have a short story in their new issue. The story is titled "Of Homes Gone," and it imagines an impoverished world where people are no longer allowed (or no longer allow themselves?) to go inside buildings. It also has boys without noses, hints of Guy Debord, and architecture that resembles "a labyrinth of capillaries." If you
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Blog postAdventure Rocketship! #1A couple years ago I asked a few writers I love to list their favorite science-fiction-themed music. The goal was to print those lists in a future issue of a new SF journal out of England, Adventure Rocketship!, that I'd begun writing for.
That second issue of AR! has yet to materialize (although I'd love to see it surface at some point), which left me holding a handful of great lists of SF music. Below are those lists, a stellar sampler of albums, songs -
Blog postIn this month's issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, I took a look back at Vermillion: the doomed, erratically brilliant DC/Helix comic book written by the late Lucius Shepard. Vermillion ran for 12 issues in 1996 and '97 before being unceremoniously canceled along with most of the Helix line, noble experiment that it was.
I love Shepard's work -- I reviewed his posthumous novel Beautiful Blood, the culmination of his masterful Dragon Griaule cycle, last year for NPR -- and it -
Blog postFor no real reason other than the fact that I'm trying to find reasons not to do actual work to today, I thought I'd rank all of Morrissey's solo albums. A little background: Morrissey's debut solo album, Viva Hate, came out in 1988 (on my 16th birthday, no less!), and as huge Smiths fan I bought it immediately. I've been faithfully buying his solo albums, for better or worse, ever since. I still spend SO MUCH FUCKING TIME listening to these albums, far more time than I spend listening to most
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Blog postSeeing as how 2014 is being put to bed, I find myself prone to the same backward-glancing rumination as your average navel-gazing creative type. Turns out, 2014 was a more happening year than it seemed to me at first. And not just because I went on an Irish honeymoon with my lovely wife in May, which was amazing. Here are a few things I've been up to over the past few months:
-A chapter on time-travel music that I wrote appeared in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's latest anthology, The Tim -
Blog postOver at Pitchfork today, our list of the top 100 albums of the first half of the decade, 2010-2014, has been posted. I got to write the entries for #60 (PJ Harvey's Let England Shake), #50 (Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Allelujah! Don't Bend Ascend!), and #28 (My Bloody Valentine's mbv). Along with the rest of Pitchfork's contributors, I submitted a ballot of my own personal top 100 albums from 2010-2014 before the master list was made. In the interest of transparency, discourse, and why-the-fu
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Blog postI am once again pinching myself. The Time Traveler's Almanac, the definitive anthology of time travel fiction, just came out via Tor Books, and I am honored to be a part of it. My essay, "Music for Time Travelers," is one of the pieces of nonfiction commissioned for the book by its award-winning editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and I'm pretty proud of it. To commemorate the release of this massive book, its three Colorado-based contributors--Connie Willis, Carrie Vaughn, and I--will be
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Blog post-A word can grow only so long, but the largest word ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet.
-A word has no arms, legs, or eyes.
-Words live where there is food, moisture, oxygen, and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
-In one acre of land, there can be more than a million words.
-Slime, which words secrete, contains nitrogen.
-Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying words m -
Blog postI wrote an essay for the new issue of Clarkesworld Magazine about growing up disadvantaged and also a fan of science fiction/fantasy. It was a hard one to write. But the issue of socioeconomic diversity in SFF is one I've thought a lot about over the years, and while I'm happy to see the issue get more traction lately, I also feel it tends to get discussed in abstract terms rather than human ones. In any case, thanks in advance for checking it out.
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Blog postDid I read even half of the new books I wanted to in 2013? Not even close. But that hasn't stopped me from looking forward to some of the most promising novels (by my humble estimation) in the speculative-fiction/science-fiction/fantasy realm that are due in the first couple months of 2014. Like these:
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead, Jan. 7)
Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (Crown, Jan. 14)
Red R -
Blog postEvery December I sit down to write one of these end-of-the-year posts, and every year I’m floored. I didn’t do half the things I swore I would this year! I did twice the things I swore I would this year! At the same time! What makes this paradox possible is the fact that I’m crazy, the world is crazy, and writing is crazy. Amid those vectors of craziness, however, shit got done. Here’s some of what went down in 2013:
-In March, I was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Semiprozine categ -
Blog postTomorrow I'll be headed to MileHiCon, Denver's longest-running science fiction/fantasy convention, which takes place in the Hyatt Regency Tech Center. I'll be there all weekend, but my programming will go down on Friday and Saturday. Here's the rundown of where I'll be... If you'd like to grab a cup of coffee, please say hi!
FRIDAY, OCT. 18
Panel: Are Writing Workshops Worth It?
With Jason Heller, Ian Tregillis, S.J. Chambers, Matthew S. Rotundo, Thea Hutcheson
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Blog postI just got my contributor's copy of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's The Time Traveller's Almanac. Holy shit. I'm sharing the Table of Contents with a staggering array of writers, including heroes of mine like Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Not to mention George R. R. Martin, Isaac Asimov, Nalo Hopkinson, William Gibson, and writer-in-residence at Odyssey Writers Workshop (and all-around inspiration), Carrie Vaughn. My contribution to the book is titled "Music f
Titles By Jason Heller
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100
Jan 31, 2015
by
Aliette de Bodard,
Kij Johnson,
Zhang Ran,
Catherynne M. Valente,
Jay Lake,
Tang Fei,
Karl Schroeder,
Damien Broderick
$3.99
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