Ever notice that fictional sorcerers always seem to have long, grizzled beards? Ever wondered why? Well, probably you haven’t, but you’re about to find out. The sorcerer “look” originally comes from a real-life sorcerer named […]
“Mortal, you have angered Shaka-sama and now Pigsy will eat your face.” This is one of the improbable lines that is never spoken in the foundational saga of Buddhist fiction. Many other improbable lines are. Further out on the improbability spectrum: Shingo Katori costumes up as a monkey.
Whenever I think of speculative fiction’s relationship to romance, I am always reminded of that scene in The Princess Bride where Fred Savage’s character interrupts his grandpa and – voice dripping with scorn – asks: […]
Last week I reviewed some tales by newcomer and indie author Joshua P. Simon. This week I’m following those reviews up by interviewing the author himself. This is something I plan on doing from time […]
Three Messages and a Warning – Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic – edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown Small Beer Press 2011 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-193152031-7 I was drawn to […]
Readers tend to gain most from reviews while writers tend to live more by opinion. That ugly thin line between the two is where fan compassion blurs with confusion.
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? […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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:
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 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 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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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). […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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