Sunday, April 01, 2012

And the Best Literary April Fool Goes to…

Though this bit of news from Locus got bounced around enough on Twitter that it was pretty clear a lot of people thought it was real, the other sentiment in the Twitterverse was sadness that it wasn’t.

The item was posted at a little after eleven this morning, under the byline of one L. Ron Creepweans:
Margaret Atwood Launches New SF Magazine

Toronto: Today Booker Prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood announced that she was launching a new science fiction magazine, Loquacious Cephalopod.

“I’ve always been gratified by the unconditional love I’ve received from the science fiction community for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, and Loquacious Cephalopod is a way to return that love. We’re interested in running the very best space opera, planetary romance, and especially hard science fiction. I’m going to fight Stanley Schmidt tooth and nail to get the very best hard SF available!”
While Atwood fans might wish that it were true, here’s some Atwood news that is: Breakthrough Entertainment has optioned the author’s award-winning children’s series, Wandering Wenda and Friends, for development as an animated series for preschool children. No word on when the series might go into production or air.

But back to both Twitter and Atwood, here -- because she’s awesome -- are the author’s Twitter-shared picks for best of the worst of April Fools: the great spaghetti harvest from Ecology and a list of the top 100 April Fools day hoaxes of all time from the Museum of Hoaxes.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Sue Bursztynski said...

I think I would have been suspicious by the time she got to space opera and planetary romance. I haven't seen it, though, although I'm a tweeter myself. Most of my followers and those I follow are writers of children's, YA and spec fic, but I think they, too, would have been suspicious.

Yes, the famous spaghetti harvest one - in the 1950s? - they even filmed people picking spaghetti from vines. There was another one where there was life on Mars and the Earth was in danger and the bigwigs were planning to take off into space and leave the rest of us to die. In all fairness, before showing it, the TV station said, "Please watch this to the end". I got suspicious right then. The sad thing is, if Earth was in danger, the bigwigs probably WOULD take off, so it was all too easy to believe.

Sunday, April 1, 2012 at 3:32:00 PM PDT  

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