Why not do both? Let’s start with Trek. The new Star Trek movie Into Darkness debuts this month. The word of mouth seems good from the few people I know who have seen advance screenings as do regular folks reporting at IMDB. I’m a little skeptical, as I did not love the last movie (bad science, comedic elements I didn’t think worked well) and Damon Lindelof, who scripted the te... Read More »
Does fantasy fiction feed racism? An important distinction between literature and film is often elided. Arthur Conan Doyle on the classification of peoples and my thoughts on the Boston Marathon bombing. Read More »
As a kid, I never liked Tolkien very much. I loved The Hobbit, like anyone did, but couldn’t ever obsess over Lord of the Rings. I could never get past the writing style heavy on description, the obsession with landscapes and language. Now, as I get older, as I try to write my own fantasy, I’m coming to appreciate Tolkien’s intense amount of work more and more. I’m rea... Read More »
Growing Pains is a new collection from the highly talented British author and editor Ian Whates. Whates is the author of the Noise series of space operas and the urban fantasy trilogy City of 100 Rows. He edits the on-going Solaris Rising anthologies and various entries in the Mammoth Book of series, including the Alternate Histories and SF Wars volumes. Whates also manages his own NewCon Press. Y... Read More »
The relationship between speculative fiction and mainstream literary fiction is complicated by decades of group identity dynamics, mutual ignorance, and overbroad critical generalizations about both genres. However, if we try to put our long-held attitudes to one side and focus our attention on the works themselves, we find that the two genres are neither incompatible, nor even that distant from o... Read More »
First of all, I must apologize for the interrupted service on this blog – I have been in and out of hospital for the best part of last month, and eventually had to say goodbye to my gallbladder, so I had to skip last fortnight’s edition. I’m now well on the way to recovery, and have used the opportunity to get a big bag of DVDs out from the video store, and catch up with all the movies... Read More »
If you are excited about the season finales that take place on many sci-fi TV shows over the next week or so, but are also sad that it might be the last time you ever see them on your screen, then fear not as with only a week to go, many of the networks have revealed which shows they are renewing and cancelling, and pretty much every sci-fi show is safe (not all programmes have been confirmed as ... Read More »
You could get a hernia trying to suspend your disbelief high enough for this premise. Read More »
As I sit wandering the internet for fresh tidbits of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I find them flourishing everywhere. Perhaps flourishing is not the right word. Flourishing leads me to images of well-manicured flower gardens and carefully pruned trees. The speculative fiction of today could very well be classified as a kudzu rather than a flower. It invades every corner of the world, chok... Read More »
The first V/H/S was a boy’s club. The sensibility of that film, an anthology released to much acclaim and success in 2012, was so aggressively straight and male that the entire film was nearly spoiled. From the framing sequence’s group of men assaulting women while videotaping their exploits to the frat-boy bar pickup/sex in a hotel of Amateur Night to the video-chat sex in The Sick Th... Read More »
Apart from sitting around the campfire, the written page is probably the most traditional method of communicating haunted tales. For this week’s edition of Deconstructing Horror, we’ll be looking at words on the page. If your just tuning in, we’ve been looking at various aspects of the haunted house genre, for the last four weeks, helping curious individuals to find quality new a... Read More »
Author Paul J. McAuley (author of ”A Very British History“, one of my favorite short stories) recently tweeted: The trouble with SF ‘worldbuilding’ is that it too often strives to be dully convincing, instead of amazing. I couldn’t agree more. Take The Lost Fleet series by John G. Hemry under the pen name Jack Campbell. The story follows the protagonist who has been ... Read More »
