Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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“It is unfortunate to me that we have to classify reading fiction as anything other than what it is. Why must it be escaping “from” something? If it has to be escapism, aren’t we escaping “to” something? Does the distinction matter? I’m not sure.” Carl V. Anderson
“Escapism is a social practice and a cultural stereotype, not an inherent characteristic of the fantastic. It is an exaggeration of the word escape itself, which does not mean ‘to lose oneself in another world,’ but to elude something that constrains you.” from “The Inevitable Reduction of the Imagination and its Opportunities: A Brief Exploration“
The last time I wrote about escapism I was trying to get a better handle on the term and its implications. As a response to that column, Carl V. Anderson asked a very pertinent question about the literary idea of escape: what are we escaping to? I’ve thought about this on and off but it wasn’t until I read Foz Meadows’ article at A Dribble of Ink last week that something clicked in my thinking about this idea. Or, more to the point, altered my perspective on the dynamic aspect of this idea. Meadows’ piece starts slowly but builds to a very incisive conclusion:
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Hello, my hearty Mangolistas! It’s that time of year again: MuchoMangoMayo 2013!
Listen to a new episode of Beware the Hairy Mango each and every day this month at the best URL for the bewaring of hairy mangoes, bewarethehairymango.com!
Have I said “mango” enough? No? Well, listen to me say it a few more times in the audio promo below in which you’ll get such a paltry amount of additional details, you’ll shake your fist at your ears!
Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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Our zombie overlords have stuck around as an all-conquering pop culture meme a whole lot longer than I thought they would, to be honest. Although I’m not instinctively fascinated by the entire sub-genre, I do like certain iterations of zombie fiction. I’ve even kind of written some myself.
But I don’t read the head honcho of zombie comics, The Walking Dead, any more (all that suffering finally became too much for me, delicate little flower that I am). Fortunately, there are other takes on the risen dead out there in the world of comics, so I thought I’d take a look at a couple of them.
One, Revival, is the first volume of a new continuing series which is perhaps not strictly about zombies, but definitely about the living dead. The other, The New Deadwardians, is a self-contained story, complete in one volume, that’s certainly about zombies but also about vampires, thereby doubling its quotient of zeitgeisty pop culture icons.
They both demonstrate that a bit of imagination and lateral thinking can squeeze fresh and interesting blood even from a stone that’s been pretty much squeezed to death already .
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“By ‘exhaustion’ I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities–by no means necessarily a cause for despair.”
“And as in the original John Barth essay, exhaustion is not meant as a term of despair, but as a call for people (and that means all of us, writers, editors, publishers, critics, readers, gatekeepers, whatever) to think a little more seriously about what we want science fiction to be. ”
Exhaustion has been on my mind a lot lately. It has been present personally as I try to improve my health, work, and just live my life. I have felt a little exhausted in terms of writing, somewhat paradoxically as I have a queue of reviews and stories and chapters to write. And I have been thinking a lot about literary exhaustion, particularly the problems of SF as “exhausted” that Paul Kincaid recently put forth and “fantasy” as often conservative (and thus limited and unlikely to innovate), which I think falls under the rubric of “exhausted.” Both of these ideas posit a profound dysfunction within each genre rooted in the “used-upness” of conventions and their potential to relate something fresh to the reader. This week I want to consider the idea of exhaustion as a way to think more usefully and critically about these problems, which I believe are actually inevitable opportunities for writers and readers to invigorate the stories they create and engage.
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Tony Millionaire’s Billy Hazelnuts is a child-like fantasy, at once impossible but also intricately detailed. The story focuses on the love triangle between two children — a young girl inventor and scientist, and a literary boy who first tries to woo her with poetry — and a boy-type creature the mice made out of trash. The mice are hoping for a hero to save them from the woman with the rolling pin. The boy is hoping to learn enough science to make his love poetry more appealing to the object of his affections. The girl mainly wants to be left alone with her work.
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JP Frantz | Friday, April 12th, 2013 at 12:29 am
Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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This well-designed collected edition of Carbonneau and Ng’s webcomic about the life of occultist Jack Parsons looks like a magical grimoire the book’s subject would have been proud of. An overlooked gem that deserves more attention. (from MTV Geek)
Publisher: Cellar Door Publishing officially released this graphic novel by Richard S. Carbonneau and artist Robin Simon Ng in 2010. I met the creators at that year’s New York Comic Con, where I picked up the book. They had a booth, copies of the book, promo materials… but less than three years later, it’s almost impossible to find. Amazon doesn’t carry it. Neither does Powell’s, or any other retailer that might have listed it online. Luckily, it’s still available in its original webcomic form (we’ll get to that at the end).
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JP Frantz | Saturday, March 30th, 2013 at 12:29 am
Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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In this episode of SF Crossing the Gulf, we tackle Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, the last novel written by C. S. Lewis, published in 1956.
At once more human and more mythic than his Perelandra trilogy, Lewis’s short novel of love, faith, and transformation (both good and ill) offers the reader much food for thought in a compact, impressively rich story. Less heavy-handedly Christian-allegorical than Narnia, Till We Have Faces gives us characters who remind us of people we know facing choices and difficulties we recognize. This deceptively simple book takes on new depth with each rereading.
We strongly recommend that you read this one for yourselves; we had rather divergent readings of it just between the two of us, and we’re already tempted to revisit this discussion later, possibly with a scholar in tow. There is no doubt that this is a complex and complicated story that will reward your attention.
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Any period of superhero comic addiction, such as I briefly enjoyed in my youth, leaves you with one or two favourite characters. It’s kind of the point: these characters are immortal, corporately-owned properties, their value to their owners largely measured by the persistence and financial implications of the attachment they instil in readers.
For me, there were plenty of favoured characters back in the day, but there was only one true favourite: Daredevil.
So here comes a look at three different takes on Daredevil: one from the 1980s, one from the 2000s and one from right now. I don’t let my nostalgic inner fanboy out to play in these columns very often, so just this once I thought I’d give him some air.
I could offer the further justification that it’s a simple little case study in the extended life of corporate superheroes, and the effect story-telling trends and gifted writers have on them. It kind of is, but honestly I’m just a bit of a DD groupie.
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In 2005, Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo published the first Trese comic. Not a cop, but working with them, Alexandra Trese and her faithful assistants solve the crimes that can’t be brought before a judge. Manila is her city, left to her by her father and his father before him, and she’s going to protect the people in it by whatever means necessary. When you live in a Manila where all of the old Filipino folklore is true, that involves making deals with some monsters, and destroying others.
Originally the Trese komiks were photocopied ashcans, passed around through fans and sold whenever you could find the author or artist to buy one. The graphic novels are published by Visual Print Enteprises, a small press in the Philippines. Their financial success, popularity, and awards led Tan and Baldisimo to sign with Flipside Publishing Services Inc., which is currently releasing the individual issues as eBooks. But even now, as huge as the komik’s creators are at home, they’re still considered outsiders, unknown by most US readers.
Those of you who are just hearing about Trese for the first time have been missing out on something amazing.
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JP Frantz | Saturday, March 16th, 2013 at 12:29 am
Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects (Veronica Mars? Really??), with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
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This was a surprise: Early on Wednesday, Entertainment Weekly broke the news that Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars, was launching a Kickstarter project to bring his character to the big screen. Within hours, the project amassed $900,000 (as of the start of my writing this), and it looks as though we’re going to have a new Veronica Mars production. It’s exciting news for fans of the show, with its pop-culture references, smart characters and great stories. The project, according to Thomas, aims to raise $2 million in the next 30 days, which will finance the production of the movie. Warner Brothers, which owns the rights, will handle the distribution, production and promotion of the film, with a limited theater run and online VOD release. What’s interesting about this project is that it’s the latest in a crowd of projects that seem to be gaining a new lease on life with the help of its fan bases.
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I enjoy following debates both large and small about the vitality or exhaustion of genre fiction; they can tell you a lot about how literature is received and related to by readers. Muses know I love a good debate about the death of SF or the power of fantastic literature, but this week I want to engage with stories rather than polemical positions. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction collections in the fantastic vein recently and what I’ve found in them is a vitality and pushing of boundaries that is, for me, what makes fantastic fiction exciting and intriguing. What these collections demonstrate is that that fantastika, in the broadest sense, is still fertile ground for wonderful, challenging stories.
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Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, a column about roleplaying games and their place in a genre reader’s and writer’s world. For what I have for you this time out, let me set the scene:
Three X-men and a former Avenger investigate a breakout on the Raft, the maximum security prison in the East River for supervillains. There, they find that numerous inmates have escaped, with the help of Electro. Cinematic battles are fought in and on the raft. In a key moment, the Hulk, at the Raft in self and solitary confinement, proves valuable in taking out Vapor, Ironclad, Vector and X-Ray, the evil Fantastic Four-like group known as the U-Foes. And discover that there are deeper and darker things afoot, that mandate a temporary alliance to uncover.
Was this the latest issue of a comic? A motion comic on DVD? A new animated Marvel series? No, none of the above. This was a recent session of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game that I participated in. Marvel is the latest roleplaying game from Margaret Weis Productions (yes, that Margaret Weis, fantasy fans).
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In this episode of SF Crossing the Gulf, we tackle Star Maker, the 1939 classic by Olaf Stapledon.
One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon’s other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.
This relatively short novel is jam-packed with all the sense of wonder you could ask for. We talk about the seeds of any number of sf stories found within its pages, its perspective on aliens, the Omega Point, and much more. If you read Star Maker and enjoy it, we strongly recommend that you also read Last and First Men, Stapledon’s earlier work of science fiction.
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Crowd funding is the in thing for obtaining money to fund a variety of projects, with Kickstarter being the most prominent of these sites. With new projects going live daily, it’s a chore to keep up with, let alone find, interesting genre projects. The Crowd Funding Roundup will be our effort to bring projects we think are interesting to your attention so you can, if you so choose, decide to help out. These posts are a collaborative effort between James Aquilone and JP Frantz.
Read the rest of this entry
“Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.” – N. K. Jemisin
“[I]t is a quintessential if not defining characteristic of epic to refer back to and revise what went before. . . .” – Catherine Bates, The Cambridge Companion to the Epic
I’ve been following the discussion that arose at the end of last week when someone at Gollancz tweeted a serious, if somewhat loaded, question:
A lengthy debate spread across the Vales of Tweet with many responses, including my own:
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