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Speculative Fiction Writer

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Tag: bias

Link Parish
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Right Matters

Posted on: June 3, 2020 Last updated on: July 21, 2020 Written by: Link Parish
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What’s fair isn’t always right. What’s right isn’t always fair. Strive for what is right. In 1958, only 6% of Americans felt interracial marriages were right. In 2013, more than 88% felt that way. Progress, right? 1967 marked two years…
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Appropriately Well

Posted on: September 17, 2017 Last updated on: April 25, 2020 Written by: Link Parish
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Write it well. That’s probably the single greatest admonition that I, as a writer, can take to heart. Write it well. I can research. Read. Interview. Have empathy. But can I ever truly write well about an experience I have…
Continue reading “Appropriately Well”…

Recent Posts

13 Sep

Epicycling Forward

Returning to my writing roots.
Continue reading “Epicycling Forward”…
29 Jun

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? The Questor Tapes

In the 1974 made-for-TV movie and series pilot “The Questor Tapes“, freshly minted android Questor has three days to locate his creator, Dr. Vaslovik. Failure is not an option. Short on time and information, Questor basically kidnaps Dr. Vaslovik’s mentee,…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? The Questor Tapes”…
03 Jun

Right Matters

What’s fair isn’t always right. What’s right isn’t always fair. Strive for what is right. In 1958, only 6% of Americans felt interracial marriages were right. In 2013, more than 88% felt that way. Progress, right? 1967 marked two years…
Continue reading “Right Matters”…
08 May

Pod People & Edit Evasion

Escape Artists Podcast Network‘s Science Fiction Imprint, Escape Pod, is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Their Flash Fiction contest is underway. My day job in real life involves work as a proof reader & fact…
Continue reading “Pod People & Edit Evasion”…
11 Apr

Worth a Watch? Maybe Not?

Today a trio of groundbreaking works that need to be remembered. They just aren’t worth a re-watch. Trust me on this. Years of recommending all three. Decades of scorn and contempt in return. Well, not that much, really. But enough…
Continue reading “Worth a Watch? Maybe Not?”…
07 Mar

What’s the Deal?

People have Deals. Large ones, small ones. Some of our Deals are plain to see. Others are hidden by accident or design. A lot of us have multiple Deals. Everyone has them. Everyone. Everyone except fictional characters. Right?!? I write…
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18 Feb

COVID19 Coping

A bakers dozen of the images that were bursts of sunshine peeking through clouds of anxiety and uncertainty. Laughter really is the best medicine. Not your cup of tea? Brian Gable’s works in the Globe and Mail seemed spot on…
Continue reading “COVID19 Coping”…
15 Feb

COVID19 Chronicle

January The parent of a friend is a viral pathologist. Their daughter is one of many immunocompromised or otherwise high risk friends. They go silent, a fact that, honestly, terrifies me. I’m thinking of the ‘at risk’ people I know,…
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26 Jan

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Enemy Mine

Wolfgang Petersen—Das Boot (1981) In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000)—took over Enemy Mine in 1985. It would be his first English-language film. Enemy Mine was more futuristic melodrama than sci-fi…
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04 Jan

To Experience Becoming

Writers regularly ask one question of other writers. Why do you write? Self-depreciating responses aside, I tend to confirmation bias the responses as “Because I cannot do otherwise.” Part of that is on me. I cannot remember not wanting to,…
Continue reading “To Experience Becoming”…
14 Dec

Infectious People

Mags is patient zero. Her contagious laugh carries across the largest, most crowded room. Her smile has been classified by the World Health Organization as a Category B Infectious Biological with an R0 value of 17. Not sure where she…
Continue reading “Infectious People”…
09 Nov

None Taller

I was sitting in the waiting room of my health care provider the other day watching a mother read “Things that Go!” to her young child. Seven times. And the laughter in both of their voices. Seven times. The excitement…
Continue reading “None Taller”…
19 Oct

Winter Writeaway

What A week secluded in a cabin far from the intrusions and distractions of Real Life. Where A cabin far from the intrusions and distractions of Real Life. Seriously, What? A few years ago my wife gave me one of…
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28 Sep

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Soldier

Writer David Peoples gave us Blade Runner, Unforgiven, and 12 Monkeys. He and director Paul Anderson–Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon–delivered Soldier. Essentially Shane in Space, this Science Fiction, One Man Army actionfest starred Kurt Russell. Critics and audiences hated it. My…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Soldier”…
07 Sep

Hooray for Hollywood

Sometimes Hollywood gets it wrong. Sometimes rather a lot really. Sometimes we do, too. Get things wrong. Growing up, I really really really wanted to be an astronaut. I knew the history of the space program, the good and the…
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16 Aug

Crossing the Streams

If you’re fortunate, you love what you do for a living. If you’re truly fortunate, you’ll do what you do for a living… with geeks. A co-worker in my current digs knows that if they send a certain email, within…
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15 Jul

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dragonriders of Pern Game

For over thirty years, master storyteller Anne McCaffrey entertained us with her epic science fantasy series the Dragonriders of Pern. The settings intrigued us, the characters grabbed us, and the stories–oh the stories. Two trilogies initially, two short story collections…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dragonriders of Pern Game”…
06 Jun

Fakereals, Realfakes

“We all know synthespians are coming. Very soon we will reach a point when we switch on a television or a computer, see an actor or newscaster, and not know if they are flesh and blood and what’s more… not…
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15 Apr

Punk Punk. Who’s There?

“Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction. Why can’t we move past cyberpunk?” That’s the title of a Lee Konstantinou Future Tense article Slate ran in January. The entire article is worth a read. But for me the precious metal…
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23 Mar

Loki Eat World

Life, for all of us, changed for the better two years ago when we added Bacchus to the pack. Moose wasn’t alone anymore and he loved the attention from Bacchus. But puppies are high energy, and Moose, now fifteen, isn’t.…
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02 Mar

State of Fury

What’s better than having a superhero hail from your hometown? Having the coolest man alive hail from there. Ah yup. Well, a character he plays, at least. Thank you Marvel for the shout-out. The good people of Huntsville, Alabama, home…
Continue reading “State of Fury”…
09 Feb

TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 3

The Drake – Heading Out We are late leaving Ushuaia. A storm is passing through and the Port is closed because of high winds. That translates into 15-20′ swells in The Drake and headwinds gusting to 90km/h on Day One.…
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26 Jan

TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 2

Our Antarctic adventure begins on 6 December with our arrival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We’ll cover that and Ushuaia next post. We chose Silversea & Silver Explorer voyage 7824. The Silver Explorer boards 123 passengers and 119 crew. There are…
Continue reading “TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 2”…
03 Dec

TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 1

I’m a big history buff in general–but not so much when it comes to treaties. If I was, I’d be a huge fan of one of the most successful treaties in the history of mankind. A living and active treaty…
Continue reading “TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 1”…
26 Nov

Quoth the Raven, Ever Noir

“The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.” Those are the words of the late Roger Ebert, critic, historian, journalist,…
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10 Nov

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dollhouse

Dollhouse was called “The best action show on network television.” It was. They said “The Actives are all young hot women.” They weren’t. Fans complained “Fox is marketing this thing like it is Cathouse.” Fox was. Picture the ‘Eliza Dushku…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dollhouse”…
25 Oct

What’s All This, Then?

No, this isn’t a travel blog and I’m not a travel writer. I know, two posts in a row mostly kinda sorta more or less no more mkay more than a little focused on travel. One was supposed to be…
Continue reading “What’s All This, Then?”…
21 Oct

TraveLink – Lucerne

Lucerne was just another in the long list of places that Samuel Clemens beat me to. No matter. Read his comments in A Tramp Abroad, and the recommendations of PlanetWare for sights to see. Mr. Clemens surprisingly fails to mention…
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24 Sep

TraveLink – Hawaii

Samuel Clemens was not perfect. But he embodied many of my writerly goals and ideals. He was the arch to my amateur; the consumate to my clumsy, the major to my… you get the drift. He traveled, observed, recorded. His…
Continue reading “TraveLink – Hawaii”…
10 Sep

Happy Noniversary

To my love, my life, best friend, wife. Muse of muses, editor, conspirator, audience and focus group. Beta reader, critic, devotee, advocate, antagonist. Comfort, mainstay. Compass. Because of you, of us, future me doesn’t hate me. Love you, babe.
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27 Aug

No Such Thing

…As bad publicity. In 1946, Kirkus Reviews described Halldor Laxness’s Independent People as “A sprawling, unselective, overlong… A bleak and bitter book, with little to interest or attract the American reader.” In 1955 Laxness took home the Nobel Prize in…
Continue reading “No Such Thing”…
07 Jul

Scratch!

What’s a seven-letter synonym for ‘Awesome’? Mitch Resnick and MIT’s Scratch. 37 million projects can’t be wrong. Yeah. You read that right. That’s Thirty-seven and six trailing zeros before the decimal. So yeah, awesome. Scratching your head? You can learn…
Continue reading “Scratch!”…
27 May

Consciously Adapting

This started as research for a class on Hidden Biases. Disappointingly, there was a lot of suitable background material. Most emotionally accessible to me was the 2017 breakout of the top 100 academic and technical high school students in STEM…
Continue reading “Consciously Adapting”…
21 Apr

Novel Writing

Growing up, there were families that hosted kids, and families that didn’t. I grew up in the latter. The crowd I hung out with met at a couple of places, but most often at the home of a pair of…
Continue reading “Novel Writing”…
16 Mar

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Fans of The X-Files, of Fringe owe some of our enjoyment to the trail of conspiracy crept in the 70’s by the Night Stalker. Rotten Tomatoes gives Kolchak: The Night Stalker a solid 86%, and 97% of the often overgenerous…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Kolchak: The Night Stalker”…
24 Feb

Fallen Apples

Artificial Intelligence, AI, isn’t going away. It also hasn’t conquered us. Yet. It has provided a looking glass of our own flaws and prejudices and biases. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay spent a day chatting with people. The dewy-eyed innocent…
Continue reading “Fallen Apples”…
12 Jan

Haiku

Haiku piqued my interest on several levels. My muse loves the imagery and the syntax. The linguist in me has an intense love-hate relationship with the myriad translations. The form had a rather humble start. Japanese poets would engage in…
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19 Nov

Looper – Time Travel Done Right

Looper is jet bike ride into a dystopian not so distant future. Time travel is used by a future syndicate to send their problem children back in time to be eradicated by hit men known as Loopers. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is…
Continue reading “Looper – Time Travel Done Right”…
28 Oct

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Green Slime

Man has looked out to space in wonder For thousands of years. Sometimes thinking that life could be somewhere And now — now it’s here! Green Slime!!! One of the best worst movies ever. Kind of sacred ground, if you…
Continue reading “Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Green Slime”…
17 Sep

Appropriately Well

Write it well. That’s probably the single greatest admonition that I, as a writer, can take to heart. Write it well. I can research. Read. Interview. Have empathy. But can I ever truly write well about an experience I have…
Continue reading “Appropriately Well”…

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