'I love To Kill a Mockingbird for all the same reasons I love good science fiction. The fourth day was devoted to a structural analysis of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which has been my favourite novel since I first read it 24 years ago, and it was both a pleasure and a horror to re-read it for this course: a pleasure because it's just so damn good, with lyrical language and wonderful characterization, and a horror because the racial injustice it describes is just as prevalent today as it was when the novel was published in 1960. writing gurus, agent Donald Maass, script doctor Chris Vogler, and thriller writer James Scott Bell. So, earlier this year, I took a four-day intensive course offered by three famous U.S. 'I firmly believe no matter how established a writer you are, you can always better your craft.

This Pulitzer Prize winning work is centred around racial tensions in the American south. universities in hopes of getting an honorary doctorate bestowed upon him one of my great regrets is that I failed.' The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth Pohl, one of the giants of SF, was a high-school dropout, but late in his life I wrote to several U.S. And, second, despite all the writing advice out there to the contrary, it's not necessary that your protagonist by likable or even sympathetic, but rather that he or she simply be truthfully drawn, warts and all, with believable underlying psychology. First, the best science fiction is not just about the grandly cosmic but also about the intimately human. When I first read it, at age 18, it taught me two things. Eighteen authors, though, have won both awards for the same title, and of that select list, Frederik Pohl's Gateway is my favourite indeed, I think it's the finest science-fiction novel ever written. 'I've been lucky enough to win the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, the two top prizes in the science-fiction field, but I did it with two different novels ( Hominids and The Terminal Experiment, respectively). (Random House Publishing Group/Bob Farley/The Washington Post/Indigo.ca) The multiple award-winning novel by famed sci-fi writer Frederik Pohl was first published in 1977.

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer