Insects away!

Yesterday I finished up my final entry for Gary Westfahl's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Themes. Insects was a fun piece to research and write (as I expected--which is why I volunteered for it in the first place) and after giving it and my Giants entry a thorough going-over, emailed them both to Westfahl in California.

I suppose I should point out here that they were both a week late. What can I say? I had Turkey City demanding my time, and Turkey City is a priority. Fortunately, Westfahl allowed me the extra week.

The bad news regarding Insects is that once again I had enough material for a solid 5,000-word article, but was constrained to a strict 1,000-word limit. Fortunately, I'm finally getting the hang of writing to specific lengths, and was able to abandon planned digressions before I wrote them. The result was very little of the hack-and-slash editing that characterized the first three entries I wrote for this Encyclopedia, Superman, Clifford Simak's City and Wonder Woman.

Folks keeping score at home will note that I made reference to H.G. Wells' The Empire of the Ants, H.M. Wogglebug T.E., Alien, Farscape, Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," Them!, The Fly, the Borg from Star Trek, several different Babylon 5 species and Patricia Anthony's Brother Termite. There's even some Stanislaw Lem in there, as well as some obvious SF novels not listed. I'm happy with how it turned out (the Giants entry, too), but as usual, regret some of the cool facts and stories I turned up during research that there wasn't room to include. When the three-volume set comes out next year, you can let me know if I bungled it or not.

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