Alphabetically by author surname, or by title of work in cases where authorship isn’t simple.

• Analog magazine. (Known for publishing hard science fiction featuring lots of science stuff.)
• Isaac Asimov’s behavior toward women.
• The Best American Short Stories.
• David Brin: The Postman.
• Lois McMaster Bujold: oaths of fealty to different districts.
• John W. Campbell’s racist views.
• Orson Scott Card:
  • Ender’s Game.
  • Speaker for the Dead.
  • homophobia.
• Hal Clement, a.k.a. Harry Clement Stubbs.
• Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy.
• Samuel R. Delany:
  • Quote: “[…] forces both social and psychological were at work to pull you toward the most conservative position you might inhabit, however poorly you might be suited for it.” —The Motion of Light in Water, setion 43.8.
  • Heavenly Breakfast (mentioned in passing).
• Cory Doctorow:
  • Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003).
  • Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005).
  • With Ben Rosenbaum: “True Names” (2008).
  • Little Brother (2008).
  • Homeland (2013).
  • Walkaway (2017).
  • Locus column (2019) about the Ride rideshare system in Austin; also about interoperability and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
  • Attack Surface (2020).
  • On Cory’s website, you can download free Creative Commons-licensed copies of many of his works by clicking individual covers on the main page, or you can purchase them from his shop.
• Harlan Ellison:
  • Cory’s 2018 post after Ellison died. (Note in case you’re concerned about criticizing Ellison after his death: Ellison himself strongly disapproved of the “don’t speak ill of the dead” concept.)
  • Clarion teaching: Ellison was infamous for his vicious, nasty, personal attacks on students at the Clarion writing workshop, supposedly in the service of making them better writers. Ellison’s essay “You Are What You Write,” published in the Clarion II anthology, described his practice of making Clarion students participate in the “Synanon Game” attack therapy system. For more on this, see my 2018 Facebook post about it, and other people’s comments. Content warning for descriptions of some of the horrible things that Ellison did and said to writing students, including hyperbolic quasi-threats of physical harm. Sometime around 1992, Clarion decided not to invite Ellison back to teach there again.
  • J. Michael Straczynski, Ellison’s executor, says he’s going to finally bring out The Last Dangerous Visions, an anthology that Ellison had originally planned to publish in the early 1970s. For details, see Wikipedia.
• Ender’s Game movie.
• Alan Dean Foster. (Recently pursued unpaid royalties that Disney owed him. More recently, other authors have come forward with similar stories, and a coalition of author groups has formed, the DisneyMustPay Joint Task Force, to push Disney to pay those authors.)
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, source of the line “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” (When Mary Anne said “Eli Weisel,” she presumably meant Anne Frank.)
• Neil Gaiman: “The Problem of Susan,” which can be found in Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things, among other places. (Ben was talking about the general topic rather than this specific story, but this story is probably the best-known fiction piece that addresses the issue.) See also:
  • Ben’s 2009 blog post on this topic.
  • Ben’s extensive discussion across several comments, on my review of the 2005 movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  • Ursula Vernon’s 2012 story “Elegant and Fine.”
  • dirgewithoutmusic’s 2013 story about Susan growing up in America as a feminist; a little too America-centric for my tastes, but widely admired. There’s also lots of other fanfic about the Problem of Susan.
• Glee.
• Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer. See also a long 2005 New Yorker article about him.
• Martin Harry Greenberg. (Prolific editor and publisher of science fiction anthologies.)
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • Starship Troopers.
  • “Where To?” (aka “Pandora‘s Box”), in which Heinlein attempted to predict, in 1950, a couple dozen aspects of what life would be like in 2000. Heinlein revisited his 1950 predictions in 1965, and then again in 1980, and in many cases he reiterated his support for his original predictions even when there was no real sign of their heading toward coming true. For a bit more on this, see my 2018 Facebook post about it.
• John Kessel: “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.”
• Margaret Killjoy. (Anarchist author.)
• John le Carré.
• Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.
• Lawrence Lessig: Pathetic dot theory, also called the “New Chicago School theory,” which talks about four regulating forces: “the law, social norms, the market, and […] technical infrastructure.”
• C.S. Lewis.
• China Miéville: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.
• Mary Anne Mohanraj:
  • “Wake,” a story about going to a protest in pandemic times, forthcoming in the anthology Whether Change: The Revolution Will Be Weird.
  • Mary Anne’s website, where you can read most of her fiction and poetry for free.
  • The haiku that Mary Anne was paid a lot for.
• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita.
• Alec Nevala-Lee: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
• Thomas Piketty: Capital in the 21st Century; also another book about the ideological dimension of political economy.
• Terry Pratchett: For the situation involving pi being 3, see the “mail-sorting engine” description in the Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki page on Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.
• Mike Resnick. (Mentioned as being an editor of anthologies.)
• Kim Stanley Robinson:
  • 2312 (2012).
  • Aurora (2015).
  • New York 2140 (2017).
  • The Ministry for the Future (2020).
• Seth Schoen: DeCSS haiku, a recasting of the DeCSS DVD-decrypting software into poem form.
• Norman Spinrad: “Emperor of Everything,” a 1987 essay about power fantasies in science fiction and fantasy, covering Ender’s Game, Dune, Chosen Ones, and more. Sadly unavailable except in a hard-to-find collection of Spinrad’s essays called Science Fiction in the Real World.
• Starship Troopers movie.
• Bruce Sterling.
• Leo Tolstoy.
• WarGames.
• Will & Grace.
• Shoshana Zuboff.