Despite what someone might initially think, genre boundaries are blurry, allowing storytellers to mix-and-match (intentionally or not) different genres, thus producing a story with an altogether new flavor.
We asked this year’s panelists this question:
Q: What are some of your favorite genre crossovers?
Here’s what they said…
Angela Slatter
Angela Slatter writes speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in
Dreaming Again,
Strange Tales II,
2012,
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and
Shimmer. Her work has had Honourable Mentions in the
Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies and has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award three times. She blogs at
AngelaSlatter.com
Favourite genre cross-overs…I’m very partial to forms that mix crime noire with horror, sci-fi or dark fantasy…Blade Runner (the film) is the obvious example of a crime – sci-fi crossover. A newer one is Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, a crime-dark fantasy crossover made of win, and Miéville’s The City & The City – which is kind of even more an expectation-breaker than usual.
I’m also a fan of things that are just plain weird – Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a mix of science and magic and horror. Kelly Link’s mingling of fantasy, magical realism and some really creepy horror (e.g. ‘Some Zombie Contingency Plans’) is always a winner. I’m also a fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker detective series as it mixes ideas and legends drawn from the Apocrypha with a crime storyline and the books work really well.
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By
John DeNardo | Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 12:29 am
This week’s Mind Meld topic was suggested by John Klima. We asked this week’s panelists (including John):
Q: Which SF/F/H book do you love that everyone else hates? Which SF/F/H book do you hate that everyone else loves?
Here’s what they said…
Farah Mendlesohn
Farah Mendlesohn used to edit
Foundation, the
International Review of Science Fiction, is the President of the International Association of the Fantastic of the Arts, and is about to send McFarland a Manuscript about Children’s and Teen science fiction. She has read around 400 of these books
so you don’t have to.
Gene Wolfe’s Wizard-Knight. As far as I am concerned this was like reading C.S.Lewis writing Conan the Barbarian. I was mostly repulsed by the ethics, and while I quite understand that this was meant to be a juvenile wet dream of muscular morality, that doesn’t mean I need to read it. The frightening thing was that when I presented this analysis to several well known critics, they agreed with me, and then went on to explain why it was a work of genius.
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This week’s topic comes from Madeline Ashby:
What Are Your Top 5 Anime Films of All Time?
Read on to see the picks of this week’s illustrious panelists.
[Note: Following the responses will be a completely unscientific (but fun) list of The Top 14 Anime Films of All Time!]
Charles Stross
Charles Stross‘ first novel,
Singularity Sky burst onto the science fiction scene in 2003 and earning Stross a Hugo nomination. Since then he has earned several awards for his novels, and his works
Missile Gap and
Accelerando are available online. His other novels include
Glasshouse,
Halting State,
Saturn’s Children,
Wireless, the books in
The Merchant Princes series and the books in
The Laundry series. In addition to writing, Stross has worked as a technical author, freelance journalist, programmer, and pharmacist. He holds degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, and some of the creatures he created for his Dungeons and Dragons adventures, the Death Knight and Githyanki, were published by TSR in the
Fiend Folio.
I’ll peg my faves as being:
- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Asks some interesting questions about identity that pick up where the first GITS movie left off. Honourable mention also goes to GITS and GITS: Stand Alone Compex.)
- Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki can do no wrong. It was this, or Princess Mononoke, or Howl’s Moving Castle, or …)
- Haibane Renmei (Haunting, weird exploration of self-discovery, death, and the loss of innocence via allegory)
- Akira (Just Because. Okay?)
- Serial Experiment Lain (More on identity and communication — you’re probably detecting a theme here, right?)
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