RIP: Chinua Achebe (1930 – 2013)
If you haven’t already heart, Chinua Achebe passed away last Thursday (March 21st). While not a genre writer, Achebe various works have had a profound impact on English-language literature. He is probably best known for Things Fall Apart, which appears from time to time on American high school English curriculum. However, he also wrote four other novels, numerous short story and poetry collections, and a number of essays. If you’ve never read anything by him before, I recommend you do. My first introduction to his work was in a graduate-level course on African literature. And, as per usual, the work in question was Things Fall Apart. Since then, I’ve read short stories, poems, and other novels by Achebe. Most of them I have enjoyed immensely. He was a great writer, to say the least. And he will be missed immensely. You can read more about Achebe and his death here and here.
ICFA (Are You Going?) and Disappeared Shaun (Temporary!)
Two things: I am presenting at this year’s ICFA (International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts). That means I will be rather busy this week with, well, paper stuff, conference stuff, and stuff stuff. However, if you are attending ICFA and would like to get together, send me an email or leave a message or something. Should be fun! (FYI: I’m presenting a paper on the adaptation of Cloud Atlas. I’m also creating a list which will include that film. Mwahaha.) Due to #1 and to some PhD stuff I need to finish, I am putting the blog on a temporary hiatus. And I mean temporary. At most, I’ll post nothing new until the end of next week. However, I strongly suspect I’ll be back at my old games on Sunday or Monday. In any case, that means all the stuff I had planned to post this week is getting moved until later, including the Retro Nostalgia feature. I just don’t have the time to put my heart into it right now (PhD stuff, conference stuff, and teaching stuff = super busy Shaun). Again, this is temporary. I am not disappearing. This blog will fill up with my nonsense before the end of the month. Promise. And that’s that.
Schedule Changes
If it’s not already obvious, I’ve dropped some of the stuff I planned to write each week, in part because of time constraints. I figured something like that would happen, since I’m a PhD student who is supposed to doing PhD work. I may come back to some of those topics again in the future (as regular columns or otherwise). Today, however, I’m going to change the schedule in a more public fashion. Everything originally planning for Mondays and Wednesdays will now drop on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The reason? I’m now teaching from 9 AM to 6:30 PM, with additional time to travel to and from campus. It’ll be easier for me to switch things around. So…consider things changed. New “Literary Explorations” column coming tomorrow!
Vacation! (Late Notice)
In case you didn’t know, I am currently on vacation, which might explain the lack of activity on this blog between last Friday and Monday the 11th. That means no Retro Nostalgia feature, no Literature Explorations, and not a whole lot of random stuff in-between. Regular programming will (mostly) resume after I return! In other news: how are you?
The 2012 WISB Awards!
The awards have come! Every year, I offer my favorites from the previous year, from movies to books and so on and so forth. This year, I’m keeping with the tradition. First, the rules: I must have consumed the chosen item in 2012, with special preference given to works released during that year. I may not have more than three runners up for any category (which means a lot of folks get left out — sorry). I have the right to drop categories if I don’t believe I can honestly assess the products contained within it (example: I can decide to drop a TV category if I only watched one show in that category because it’s really not fair for me to assess the best of the best if I haven’t actually watched more than one show). So, without further delay, here are my selections for the 2012 WISB Awards: Best Novel I loved this book so much that I almost taught it in my American dystopia class. Unfortunately, space constraints prevented me from doing so. In any case, if you want to know exactly what I thought of the book, you can read my review. The short version: simply stunning. Then again, I’ve loved Brian Francis Slattery since Spaceman Blues, and will probably keep on the love affair for as long as he lets me… Runners Up: The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, And Blue Skies From Pain by Stina Leicht, and Arctic Rising by Tobias S. Buckell. Best Collection or Anthology This is the only award I am giving to a work that wasn’t actually published in 2012, which I will justify by saying, “I reviewed it in 2012, which is good enough for me.” Maureen McHugh’s After the Apocalypse is more a concept collection (a la Christopher Barzak’s Birds and Birthdays) than a traditional collection. Exploring the various ways humanity responds to catastrophe, this collection quickly became one to remember, so much so that Locus put it on its 2011 recommended reading list. That’s about where I would have put it too — except I decided to give it an award! Runner Up: Near + Far by Cat Rambo Best Publisher It comes down to a numbers game this year: I reviewed more books from Tor than any other publisher. On top of that, my #1 novel selection for the year came from Tor. Let’s face it: they publish some damn good stuff, and this year happens to have been an exceptional one for them. Keep it up, Tor! Runners Up: Nightshade Books, Angry Robot Books, and Small Beer Press. Best Magazine The award might have gone to a different magazine this year, except Interzone changed up its format so much that I ended up loving it even more than before. That new format involves a tighter print size, a sturdier binding, a complete overhaul of the cover and interior designs, and the same wonderful fiction I came to love when I got my first subscription so many years ago. While other magazines were downsizing their production schedules or changing up management, TTA Press were busy turning Interzone into a better, more attractive product. Call it Interzone 2.0, if you like. Runners Up: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Cross Genres, and Shimmer. Best Cover Min Yum’s dark illustration for And Blue Skies from Pain falls within that range of work that I honestly love looking at. If I could, I’d buy a poster of the art and put it on my wall. You’ll forgive me for having no clue what to call the style; whatever it is, I like the way the dark colors blend together, almost like someone took pastels and used a finger to delicately sync everything together. Hopefully we’ll see more of Yum’s work in the future. Runners Up: Jagannath by Karen Tidbeck (artist: Jeremy Zerfoss), Osiris by E. J. Swift (artist: Sparth), and Fate of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner (artist: Stephan Martiniere). Best Film I know. You either loved this movie or you hated it. Can you guess where I stand? To be honest, I think Cloud Atlas is perhaps one of the greatest films of the last decade, and I was surprised that it did not receive any recognition by the Academy for its various achievements. After all, Cloud Atlas isn’t a “safe” film. Everything could have gone terribly wrong right from the beginning. But it didn’t. Instead, Cloud Atlas became a thought-provoking tour de force. Screw The Matrix. This is what the Wachowskis were meant to create. Genius. Runners Up: John Carter, The Avengers, and Cabin in the Woods. Best Television Show This is such an easy choice for me. Game of Thrones pulled out all the stops this year. Unlike the first season, the newest season actually gave us one of the major battles: the siege of King’s Landing. Throw in the continued stunning performances from Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, and Maisie Williams and there’s just no contest: this is the best genre television show on air right now. Period. Runners Up: The Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, and Doctor Who. Best Non-Genre Film I had a lot of apprehensions about this film, but went to see it with my grandmother anyway. And guess what? I enjoyed it so much that I issued an ultimatum to the Academy: give Daniel Day-Lewis a bloody Oscar or else! While Tony Kushner’s script takes some liberties — for example, it has never been proven that Thaddeus Stevens had a monogamous relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith — the adaptation of Lincoln’s battle to end of slavery is, if anything, beautifully rendered and handled with expert precision by a solid cast. I expect this one to take a lot of awards this year. It damn well deserves it. Runner Up: Skyfall Best Non-Genre Television Show Admittedly, I’m perpetually behind on non-genre TV shows. For example, I only now started watching shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent or the first seasons of the original
A Few Blog Changes
(Note: There’s a little request for input at the end. I’d really appreciate your thoughts.) Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to change how things are run on this site. You’ll have noticed that I wasn’t an active blogger for the latter half of 2012, whereas the first month-ish of 2013 has shown the exact opposite. Part of this had to do with a lack of time on my part, but it also stemmed from having nothing to say, or not having the will to put some thought into topics suggested to me. I don’t want the same thing to happen in 2013, which is why I start this thread on Google+ asking about scheduled columns and other blog-related things. That thread gave me the push I need to make the following changes: 1) For the foreseeable future, the following will be regular, day-specific features on this blog (some will have proper titles; some will not): Monday — Retro Nostalgia (rethinking/re-examining classic genre films/TV — Example) OR Movie Reviews (Example) Tuesday — Free Day (I can write about whatever I want) Wednesday — Exploring Genre Literature (in which I examine actual works of lit, new and old, in a similar fashion as this recent post on Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops series) — this needs a proper title, methinks. Thursday — Free Day (I can write about whatever I want) Friday — Adventures in Teaching (discussions about teaching genre lit, and related teaching topics — Example) Saturday — Book Review Saturdays (Example) Sunday — Free Day (I can write about whatever I want) Note: Free Days are also days I will post non-weekly stuff, such as my “Adventures in…Cancer” stuff (see below). 2) Occasionally, I post short bits on little videos I’ve found or academic material I think you all might be interested in. Those columns will continue to appear somewhat randomly throughout the year (Videos Found, Academic Spotlight, Promo Bits, Photo Bits, etc.). I may also continue the Science My Science Fiction columns, although with a different thought process behind it. Peggy Kolm already explores the intersections between science and science fiction with the kind of detail you’d expect of someone who focuses on that issue; I, therefore, need to find a very unique direction for that column. 3) I will continue to blog about my cancer experiences, though on a more regular schedule. For now, I am making it an every-other-week feature, starting the week after next. It is possible I will make more changes to this schedule in the future, either by moving things around, adding new columns, or something else (I’ve considered creating an interview series here, but I already review/interview so much at The Skiffy and Fanty Show that I’m not sure I can really put in the time for such a thing — we’ll see). So that’s that. The game starts tomorrow (not “the” game, mind — that’s in about 4 hours…). P.S.: If anyone has better titles for these features, please let me know. I’m terrible with titles… Likewise, if you have any thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., send an email to arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com or leave a comment. You can suggest just about anything (posts you’d rather see, etc. etc. etc.).