The Big Idea: Peter Watts

Times are tough, and according to Hugo award-winning author Peter Watts, they ain’t getting any better. But perhaps not all hope is lost. Optimism seems to be the surprising route Watts has taken with his newest short story collection, Fold Catastrophes. Pull yourself out of your doomer-spiral and check out his Big Idea. PETER WATTS: I had to be dragged into this. I’m not pimping a novel, after all. I’m pimping a short story collection: a bunch of largely-unrelated small ideas coexisting between the same covers (or locked behind the same paywall, for those of you still in thrall to Amazon). Such collections aren’t often bound together by a unifying theme. Hell, the guidelines for Big Idea explicitly describe it as a platform for promoting novels and novellae. No mention of collections at all. It seemed ironclad, until Rick Klaw over at Tachyon sent me links to a half-dozen Big Ideas focused on story collections. Scalzi clearly needs to update his guidelines. In the meantime, I better…