I’ll shoot you an email about the China topic next week if I don’t see more about the subject. Thanks for digging into that!

My impression was that British SF is not so dark as American is right now — that this is still a trend. But even so, Jetse de Vries was commenting on the darkness of submissions to Interzone more than a year ago, so maybe this hits short story markets first?

I’m oddly attracted to the question of whether Canadian SF is less negative. I mean, Robert Charles Wilson, Bob Sawyer, Cory Doctorow (we can claim him as Canadian, can’t we?)… they don’t seem like pessimists to me.

The terrorism thing — yeah, I am kind of making an effort to avoid it in stories these days. Weirdly, I was writing stories about scary techno- or bio-terrorists before 9-11, and as soon as it happened, I figured, well, shit,that’s old news now, what can I do next. (That said, the story I most recently sold to Asimov’s involves eco-terrorism on a huge scale. But I’m trying to steer clear of it as a theme… If someone wants to shed light on how we think of terrorists, it seems it’d be better to explore it through something that looks like something else. Like mythic 19th century “Anarchists” for example. Sort of like how the bug-people — what were they called again — in Perdido Street Station felt quite analogous to how Westerners in the 19th century felt about Chinese immigrant communities, and the immigrants’ reciprocal feelings.)

I’ve no idea what kind of stuff is being published in China, but I could ask my Chinese exchange students whether they have any friends who could answer that question. Someone’s gotta know someone, the stuff is so popular there.

Shoot me an email if I don’t post about it in the next week or so, would you?