Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction
Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of Subterranean Press’ new anthology, Edited By. The book collects notable works of short fiction that have been, well, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most notable short fiction editors in the world of SF/F/H. It’s a beefy book full of stories by some incredible writers, including Elizabeth […]
Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)
As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes. In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which […]
The Space Opera Project Continues!
Some of you may recall that I began a database project last year containing space opera novels by women. To date, the list includes nearly 700 novels in the space opera genre. This has come through a combination of my own knowledge and the knowledge of the science fiction community, who have suggested numerous works […]
On Space Opera: The Heart of Genre, Forgotten by Scholars
A few years ago, I taught an upper division literature course on American space opera. There were a couple reasons I chose that angle over many other possible science fiction topics I could have taught: It gave me an excuse to teach Ann Leckie, Tobias S. Buckell, and Star Wars. The course was marked as “American […]
Worldcon 2019 (Dublin): An Accounting of Events with a Side of Bacon!
I am on my way home from Dublin OR have already arrived. Like science fiction, my future is fundamentally about the present. Naturally, that means Worldcon has ended along with my sadly short vacation in Dublin, Ireland, a quaint little city… Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Dublin is really cool, y’all. And since “recaps […]
Life Log #03: Strange Spines, Mites, and BEER!
The past five days have been…interesting. Yes. Interesting. Let’s go with that. So, what happened?