BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Mellie is Snow White’s supposedly wicked stepmother, but she’s been misunderstood for centuries by the one-sided telling of the fairy tale. Now, she’s out to set the story straight and redeem the reputation of stepparents everywhere, but she’s going about it all wrong. Prince “Dave” Charming, one of the several Princes Charming, tries to help her, and they fall for each other.
MY REVIEW:
PROS: Wonderful world-building and nicely drawn characters.; Wickedly Charming is a fun foray into the paranormal romance genre.
CONS: The limitations of the paranormal romance genre hobble Grayson’s story.
BOTTOM LINE: Grayson brings a sweet touch of reality to one of the most maligned characters in fairy tales.
[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
As 2011 draws to a close, it’s time for our annual roundup of SF/F consumed during the year. For this week’s Mind Meld we turned to our ever expanding coterie of SF Signal irregular for their answers. We asked them this question:
What are your favorite SF/F books/movies/TV shows/comics/etc. that you consumed in 2011?
Here’s what they said…
Jessica Strider
Jessica Strider works once a week at a major bookstore in Toronto. The other 6 days are spent reading books, taking pictures, acting as a pillow for 2 kitties and cooking. Her in store SFF newsletter, the Sci-Fi Fan Letter, eventually evolved into a blog for author interviews, themed reading lists, book reviews and more. She plans to have a novel published one day.
I’m hoping to still read a few good SF/F books before the year ends, but I’ve had a remarkably good year for books so I’m going to focus on those. Here, in the order I read them, are the books I enjoyed and recommend:
The Fallen Blade – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Eutopia - David Nickle
The Dragon’s Path – Daniel Abraham
O.4/Human.4 – Mike Lancaster
Trouble and Her Friends – Melissa Scott
Element Zero – James Knapp
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs
If you read fantasy fiction, then there’s a very good chance you’ve come across the name Terri Windling. From Bordertown, Silver Birch, Blood Moon and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror she co-edited with Ellen Datlow, Terri has changed the face of contemporary short fiction.
Now Terri is in need and a special website has been dedicated to raise some money for a good cause. Go visit Magick 4 Terri and you can bid on prozes donated by folks like George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Steven Brust and a host of others.
For those who missed the firstthreeparts: I was finally let in on SF Signal’s little secret: they have a time machine and they allowed me to use it to travel back to those times in the history of science fiction that I thought interesting to report on. In part 1, I traveled to the first World Science Fiction convention in 1939 and interviewed John W. Campbell. In Part 2, I made for 1957 where I managed to wrangle an interview from a rather busy Isaac Asimov. For my third trip I’d revisited a Harlan Ellison reading from 1995. After hearing that reading again, I knew where I needed to go next–
I made an educated guess as to where the 97th World Science Fiction convention would be held. Given that the 97th convention would take place in 2039, it seemed to me there was only one possibility: the Big Apple; New York, New York. It turned out that I was correct, and why not? In addition to being the 97th WorldCon, it was also the 100th anniversary of the 1st WorldCon, a visit to which I’ve already described. Even guessing when it would take place wasn’t difficult: September 1-5, Labor Day weekend.
Finding the hotel in which it took place was a bit more tricky. I figured that once I got to New York, I could hop on the Internet and figure it out but the Internet had changed somewhat, evolved into more of an augmented reality in which (as a quickly learned) special contact lenses were needed to reveal and interact with that reality. It took some practice, but I managed. The most difficult part, of course, was obtaining a membership. There was good reason why I couldn’t attend under my own name, and while it is easy to appear to be a journalist in the past when you know what has happened, it is a much trickier thing to do in the future when the last 28 years are an unknown. So I attended as a fan and my name tag (a virtual tag that one could see along with my various social networking statuses thanks to the AR at the hotel) read: DAVID SELIG.
Steve Berman has posted the table of contents for the upcoming anthology he co-edited with JoSelle Vanderhooft: Heiresses of Russ, a new annual anthology created in honor of Joanna Russ:
“Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier” by Groegina Bruce
“Storyville 1910″ by Jewelle Gomez
“Her Heart Would Surely Break in Two” by Michelle Labbé
“Black Eyed Susan” by Esther Garber / Tanith Lee
“Thimbleriggery and Fledglings” by Steve Berman
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky
Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, my column here on SF Signal about roleplaying games and their place in a genre reader and writer’s world. This time out, I would like to tackle another of the ur-games of the genre.
If the ur-game for fantasy roleplaying games is Dungeons and Dragons, then the ur-game for science fiction, specifically space opera games, is Traveller. While probably near every reader of genre, and many who don’t read genre has heard of Dungeons and Dragons, I bet that Traveller, even though it was a formative a game in its way, is far less known to you. There are reasons for that, but let’s table that for the moment and just correct that imbalance, shall we?
Jonathan Strahan has posted the table of contents for his upcoming anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six, which should be out in March 2012:
Athena Andreadis was born in Greece and lured to the US at age 18 by a full scholarship to Harvard, then MIT. She does basic research in molecular neurobiology, focusing on mechanisms of mental retardation and dementia. She is an avid reader in four languages across genres, the author of To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek and writes speculative fiction and non-fiction on a wide swath of topics. Her work can be found in Harvard Review, Belles Lettres, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Stone Telling, Cabinet des Fées, Bull Spec, Science in My Fiction, SF Signal, The Apex Blog, World SF, SFF Portal, H+ Magazine, io9, The Huffington Post, and her own site, Starship Reckless.
CHARLES TAN: Hi Athena! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you first get acquainted with Science Fiction and Fantasy?
ATHENA ANDREADIS: My pleasure, Charles! I taught myself to read at four; I wanted to figure out what was this mysterious activity that diverted my adoring, adored father’s attention from me… The first book I clearly recall reading was Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (unexpurgated, I found out later). So you can say my acquaintance with SF&F started early – and I’ve been a constant wanderer in this literary domain ever since.
“We’re in a strange relationship with our fiction, you see. Sometimes we fear it’s taking us over. Sometimes we beg to be taken over by it . . . sometimes we want to see what’s inside it.” – Dr. Horne, from “Planet Fiction,” in Planetary: The Fourth Man.
“Vivification: the action or act of investing with an air of vitality or reality” – Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles
It initially seems odd to say that we have “a strange relationship with our fiction.” Thinking of a text as something that you have a relationship with may seem ludicrous at first, but what Warren Ellis (through Dr. Horne) implies is not just that we have a proximity of some sort to fiction, but that we experience a consociation with fiction. We bring ourselves “into or establish association, connection, or relation” with fiction. More than that, we often actualize a dynamic relationship with it, one with emotional and even (broadly) sensual aspects to it. Our relationship to fiction is strange because it is more like our relationships with people than almost any other object or concept we encounter, This kind of narrative creates not just discursive effects, but imaginative and emotional affects.
I think that, for a number of reasons, this dynamic is intensified in fantastika (in its widest definition). I am not sure that it is most intense(romance novels generate vast amounts of affect as well), but the relationship with fantastic fiction often propagates not just intensity but a multifarious sociality. Fantastika does not just give us stories to experience alone and together, stories to exchange and argue about and bond over, but creates a peculiar and often powerful relationship with specific fictions and with fiction in general. We create a dual vivification in this relationship; we “bring life to; animate, quicken” texts while these texts “enliven, brighten, sharpen” our imaginations. Of course, the texts do not do this “themselves;” in the process of making them live, we enliven ourselves through them.
MY RATING: 
(or 5 out of 5 Sparkly Hearts)
Jonathan Strahan has posted the 
