Science Fiction

Random Stuff, Star Wars

Welcome to Endor: A Forest Getaway You Won’t Forget

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Are you looking for an escape from the bustling metropolis world of Coruscant or Eufornis Major? Do you desire an adventure in a forested wonderland where you can experience nature in its purest form? Have you always wanted an unforgettable experience you can tell your friends about for years to come? If you answered yes, then a trip to the amazing forest moon of Endor is just what you need. Our attractive vacation packages will take you on adventures even dreams could not imagine. And with six new hyperspace lanes dedicated to travel into the Endor system, it’s never been easier to bring the whole family to this incredible moon.

The Bookening

The Bookening: New Reads in the Abode of Awesomesauce

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There are an absolutely bonkers amount of books in my house, and I’m making that even more bonkers by getting more books. The Rule of Five continues this week with a nerdy, literary, and certainly fantastic collection of additions that I’m sure will make my day…when I am able to read them! What nifty books do I have to share this time? Here they are:

SF/F Commentary, Star Wars

Struggles in Heroism: On the (New) Star Wars Expanded Universe

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It’s probably not a big secret that I have had “issues” with Star Wars in its Disney years. There are a lot of things I love about the direction things are going — a more diverse cast, the emphasis on big sprawling adventure, etc. — but there are also problems I have with the cohesion of the stories, the structure of the narratives, Disney’s treatment of character, etc. Yet, it’s still Star Wars, and even when it’s not quite on the mark, it’s still enormously fun. However, there’s something a tad “off” for me about Star Wars, especially the new Expanded Universe. Recently, I’ve been listening to several audiobooks of new Star Wars novels — Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Resistance Reborn — and it got me thinking a lot about some of the things that have made the Disney era so difficult for me as a Star Wars fan. To be clear: I have zero intention of bashing Star Wars here; rather, I want to talk a bit about what I have found less enticing about this new era while still keeping my love for this franchise.

SF/F Commentary

Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction

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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 Bear, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and many others. Part of what interests me about this book is the concept behind it and the way it highlights the weird imbalance of awareness about editors in publishing. It is comparatively easy to collect work edited by one short fiction editor than it is to do the same for novel editors. Short fiction editors also seem, in my opinion, much more visible, perhaps because they work with so many authors at a time (a benefit of the short format) than their novel-editing peers.[efn_note]I’m aware that some editors work in both lengths.[/efn_note] This makes it rather easy for us to recognize the work editors do even if we don’t actually know what it is that they do.

Academia

The Science Fiction Research I Didn’t Present This Weekend

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As many of you know, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) has been cancelled. I am a regular attendee and have presented my research there several times. This year, I was set to moderate a panel and present an essay entitled “Postcolonial Thought, Decolonizing the Anthropocene, and Tobias S. Buckell’s Climate Change Novels.” That project is now on hold until I can find the time to put in edits and submit it somewhere. However, I will talk a bit about the research that went into this project. Strap in!

SF/F Commentary

Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)

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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.[efn_note]In actuality, I really hate the treatment of most reptiles in genre, but snakes get it worse than most. They used bearded dragons (the inland or central subspecies, Pogona vitticeps) in Holes (2003) even though they’re not from the United States and don’t fan out their heads like some kind of Jurassic Park monster, and there was a recent film called Crawl (2019) set in Florida that was wildly confused about both the way alligators behave and the relationship Floridians have to the creatures. It’s really frustrating, y’all.[/efn_note] 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 feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear.[efn_note]All of my examples will be from films. However, I’m sure some of the problems I discuss in this post apply to literature, though probably to a lesser degree because a lot of novel writers are weirdly obsessed about research. :P[/efn_note] There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points:

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