How to Begin a Short Story
Maybe I’m just impatient, but I’ll generally stop reading a short story if the first two paragraphs don’t answer the following questions: Who is this story about? (Character) Why should I care about that character? […]
Three Military Fantasy Shorts
For this week, I’m going to do things differently. Rather than review a single work, I’ll look at three stories set in the same universe. One of the reasons I decided to focus my blogging […]
Lost In Space! Reviews of Unknown or Underappreciated Books: The Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron
Hello and welcome to what will be an occasional feature on my blog! So – what, exactly, do I mean by ‘unknown or underappreciated’? To put it simply – not everyone is a Kevin J. […]
Crossroads: The Power in Paranormal Romance
Happy Valentine’s Day! In my first draft of this week’s essay, I started to trace the history of the paranormal romance all the way from the Gothic novel, through to noir, into romantic suspense, urban […]
Stephen King – A Beginner’s Guide
For a long time I paid no attention to the writing of Joyce Carol Oates. But I kept seeing her mentioned in the context of modern American Gothic, being recommended by writers whose work I […]
Swashbuckling with Morticai
Morticai’s Luck Darlene Bolesny Dark Star Books Trade ppb, 245 p., $15.95 Ebook, $5.95 Ever gone to a con and come home with more books than it’s humanly possible to read in a reasonable period […]
Dark History: Bran Mak Morn
Robert E. Howard, more than anything, wanted to sell to Adventure Magazine. This publication of the Buttrick Co. was considered by many the best Pulp of all the hundreds of cheap magazines published between the […]
Synthetic Voices #14 – January 2013 Top Picks
This month’s Top Picks are some of the most clever stories I’ve heard in a while. I guess January is just a clever kind of month! [powerpress] Discuss on:
Crossroads: Romance – More Powerful than You Could Possibly Imagine
Today is February 7th, and with Valentine’s Day around the corner, love is in the air. Which is why this month I’ll be taking a look at romance, and how it rubs up against speculative […]
The Galapagos Frontier Thesis
The formative American experience was the conquest of the western frontier. Would science fiction and fantasy exist without the frontier model? What does Japan’s parallel conquest of Hokkaido tell us about the legacy of colonial expansion?
Frogs in Aspic, Like a Box of Chocolates
Frogs in Aspic Keith P. Graham Kindle only $1.99 I’m partial to short fiction, especially lately when I have so many interruptions it seems to take forever to finish a novel. So when a collection […]
Objects in Dreams (Imaginings Volume 4) by Lisa Tuttle
Lisa Tuttle has long been one of the masters of the deeply unsettling tale. Last year her short story Objects in Dreams may be Closer than they Appear opened Jonathan Oliver’s excellent anthology, House of Fear, […]
Crossroads: Tripping the Noir Fantastic
Last week, we talked about some of the tensions between science fiction and noir. Fantasy, which relies on metaphor even more than science fiction, has an even more challenging time of it. Its traditional themes […]
Synthetic Voices’ Top Podcasted Stories of 2012
Over at the Synthetic Voices podcast, I see a LOT of fiction over the course of a calendar year. Now, the 2012th year of the Common Era is coming to a close, so I thought I’d […]
Epic Fantasy Analysis Jan 24, 2013
My intention is to do these analysis every 15 days or so. This is the second in the series and is from data as of 1/24/2013. To review previous data (01/03/2013 you can click here). […]
Synthetic Voices #13 – December 2012 Top Picks
This month has been a tumultuous one – travel, holidays, and illness. Podcasted fiction seems to have also had a hard time, December representing the weakest month for fiction that I have yet seen. Even […]
Why Doesn’t Fantasy Sell in Japan?
Epic fantasy is a hard sell in Japan. Why? A country so saturated in the fantastic seemingly ought to have an affinity for our beloved genre. But shared passions often get lost in translation.
The Dangers of Ignoring the Ebook Revolution
On January 8th, the long awaited final edition in the Wheel of Times series was released in hardcover. The ebook, however, was no where to be found, and won’t be available until April 9th. Hardcover […]
Of Shadows and Serpent – The First Sword & Sorcery Tale
When people think of 1929 they usually recall the Great Depression and “Black Tuesday” (October 29th). I prefer to think of it as the year Sword & Sorcery was born. For S&S, like its greatest […]
On Genre Diversity, or ‘Why Mark Charan Newton was Right’
A couple of years ago, Mark Charan Newton, author of Nights of Villjamur and Drakenfeld, as he’s wont to do, stirred some feathers when he challenged several bloggers to diversify their book coverage, to shift […]
What Was I Thinking?
I’ve never written a blog. I’ve never had the urge to write a blog. So imagine my surprise when I bumped into a fantastic opportunity that I couldn’t resist: writing a weekly blog for Amazing […]
Epic Fantasy Analysis Jan 3, 2013
November 2010 was a watershed moment with regards to the ebook revolution. That was the month I saw my sales go from a modest 1,000 per month (across 4 titles) to 10,000+ a month (across […]
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