Struggles in Heroism: On the (New) Star Wars Expanded Universe
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 […]
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 […]
The Science Fiction Research I Didn’t Present This Weekend
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 […]
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 […]
Film Challenge: 10 Underrated SF/F Films (1999-2019)
I have once more (and a very long time ago) been challenged by Ian Sales to join him in our un-named war to come up with the best arbitrary list of films within an equally arbitrarily selected category. You can find previous iterations of this absurdity here, here, here, here, and here. We have, alas, […]