The West, Science Fiction, and No Future
Over at Genreville (on the Publisher Weekly’s blog), Josh Jasper asks a very intriguing question: Perhaps the future really belongs to people who’re hungry for it, not the ones who take it for granted. Does western culture take the future for granted these days, whereas rising cultures don’t? I think this really depends on who […]
Genre Labels: Are They Reductive?
A friend and I were having a discussion about The Famished Road by Ben Okri, a Nigerian novel with particularly obvious fantastic elements, and he thought that by labeling the novel as fantasy, I was being reductive. I’ll try to recollect much of the discussion here, but I’m sure I’ll leave out some salient point […]
The Confused Term: “Stealth Worldbuilding”
What exactly is so stealth about standalone fantasy novels set in the same world? Am I missing some crucial point, or am I the only one who thinks that if you take a few minutes to do your homework or are an attentive reader, it would be obvious that a bunch of standalone novels are […]
Question: If you were going to teach a class on fantasy literature, what would you cover?
That’s a big question. I’ve always wanted to design an introductory course on science fiction or fantasy (doing both at the same time would be impossible). Selecting texts, however, is always a problem for any genre-specific course. Where do you start? Where do you end? Which movements do you represent or ignore? Do you risk […]
Step One For Making Friends With English: Punctuation and Pronunciation
We all like English, right? Okay, so maybe most people don’t, but if you do, then it would only seem logical that you’d do your best to follow the very basic rules of the language, right? And wouldn’t you expect that the people who take the language seriously enough to try to make a living […]
Responding to the Stackpole: Amazon/Macmillan vs. Not-So-Stupid Authors
Michael A. Stackpole made an interesting point the other day. He seems to think that the call for support by Macmillan authors whose books had been removed from Amazon is a stupid thing to do (not because support for authors is bad, but it presumes that authors will suffer). He disagrees because of the following: […]