Roger Floyd's Website

I’m reading a memoir right now.  I don’t normally read memoir or biography anymore, at least not in the past thirty years or so.  But the book I’m reading is a memoir about life in New Mexico, and I decided to try it as a diversion from the scientific and science fiction books I usually read. …

Science fiction likes to work on huge scales.  And with few resources.  One common theme I’ve noticed that runs through many science fiction novels and short stories is the idea of one person or a small group of people saving–with just their wits and maybe a weapon or two–a huge section of space such as an…

I was in a bookstore a few days ago, browsing in the Science and Nature section, which is right next to the science fiction area, and when I finished I moved over to sci-fi and began my weekly browse there.  I didn’t find anything I particularly wanted to buy at that time, though I did…

A lot has been made of evolution in the past hundred and fifty years or so, but I got to wondering what’s likely to happen in the future.  What will humans look like, say, a thousand years from now?  What will our lifestyle, our scientific advances, our political structure affect how we evolve?  It’s an interesting–and not unimportant–question. …

One day last week I read an online article about writers who send queries to literary agents and get only a rejection letter in return.  The article gave several stock phrases used by agents in their rejections and commented briefly on each one.  Since I had completed sending in a large number of queries for a science-fiction novel…

What is a blog, anyway?  Sure, the term evolved from the concept of the “web log,” the idea that someone would put their thoughts down on a computer screen and post them to the “world-wide web” so anyone could read them.  Must have been a heady time back then, knowing that all you wrote could be…

SCENE:  [A Subcommittee hearing room in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.  The Subcommittee on Violence Against Women is just coming to order.  On the Subcommittee are seven women senators, four Democrats and three Republicans.  They take their places at the hearing table and all sit except the Chairwoman, The Honorable Gertrude (Trudy) Schmidlapp in the center. …

What is it about science fiction that makes those of us who like to read and/or watch it (and would otherwise be described as nerds) actually pick up a sci-fi book or watch a sci-fi movie or TV series?  I’ve asked myself this question numerous times and have never come up with a really good answer. …

Do you remember from high school algebra (or even junior high algebra) how you learned about positive numbers and negative numbers?  I do.  In that class my first-year algebra teacher drew a long horizontal line on the board and put a mark at the center.  That mark he labeled “0.”  That is, zero.  Then he wrote the numbers…

I’ve been watching the Agatha Christie Poirot novels that  have been televised by PBS over the last several years, and I’ve been struck by one rather odd aspect of the character of Hercule Poirot.  At least the televised character.  It’s an aspect that isn’t unique to Poirot, however.  I’ve noticed it in at least one other fictitious private detective, Sherlock…

I like to write and read science fiction.  Not fantasy, mind you, nor horror or steampunk or alternate history or many of the other subdivisions into which the genre is currently divided.  It’s fun and interesting to me, and it gives me a chance to use some of the science I learned in high school, college…

I’ve noticed over the past several years of trying to get stories published (I’m speaking of fiction here) that there doesn’t seem to be a standard number of words that defines the different divisions of story length.  The names of the different story lengths are reasonably uniform, though even in that case there’s a difference of opinion…