The Sensation of Freaking Out, While Enjoying Yourself Immensely
“Because the day nourishes dry dreams and wounds your angelical being, you will set off in search of night. . . .” – Jaime Sáenz Reading is a peculiar [...]
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Articles by John H. Stevens
The Sweet Sharpness of the Knife: More Thoughts on Fables of Unconsummated Readings
” The stories we tell about reading need to bound a potentially unending process of interpretation and imagination, even when we do not complete a reading. Or, come to [...]
The Grumplesnark’s Pantagruelian Vexation and Other Fables of Unconsummated Reading
Everyone has their quirks and habits as a reader, and one of mine is that I dislike not finishing a story. Many readers share this predilection; the reasons vary, from a [...]
Criticism as Fantasia and Inquiry
“Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per se.” – Joanna Russ. “By its function, [criticism] [...]
Against Easy Answers: Using The Fantastic To Create A Harsh Wonder That Opens Our Eyes
Last week I ended my column by stating that “[w]e need to draw deeper not just from those other wells [of inspiration], but from [our] own, understand our own depths [...]
Water from a Deeper Well: Thoughts Toward a More Imaginative Fantastika
“I went to the river but the river was dry I fell to my knees and I looked to the sky I looked to the sky and the spring rain fell I saw the water from a deeper [...]
The Fantasy of Kingship
“The fundamental idea underlying kingship is the separation of one human being from others. Being set apart is the very crux of the institution. The ways in which this [...]
Simplicity, Drama, and Domination: On Monarchy in Secondary-World Fiction
I am still chewing on the tasty gristle of last week’s Mind Meld on monarchism in fantasy fiction. I can’t get the subject out of my mind, to the point where I [...]
BOOK REVIEW: Noctuary by Thomas Ligotti
REVIEW SUMMARY: A gathering of potent word-rituals MY RATING: BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A revised collection of Ligotti’s stories, both the old and new material probe baroque [...]
VIDEO: Anthropology for Writers [Readercon Panel]
At last weekend’s Readercon 23 I led a panel on the subject of writing culture in fantastic fiction. This is the description from the program: In a 2011 blog [...]
Culture, Imagination and Fantastika: More Thoughts on Conjuration
“Not only does the imaginative consciousness allow us to transcend (depasser) the immediacy of the present instant in order to grasp a future that is at first [...]
Worlds Are Conjured, Not Built
I am heading to Readercon this Thursday, 12 July, and I am very happy to be a participant for the first time. It is going to be a very different experience and one that I [...]
Diving Into Pandemonium: Some Turbulent Postulations About Reading and the Fantastic
“In metaphorical terms, one could say that the processes essential to the reading mind are not mechanical or computational, but more oceanic, that is, dynamic, fluvial and [...]
Nothing Can Fly Us Away From Here: More Thoughts About Thomas M. Disch’s “On Wings of Song”
“For the future to be interesting your desires, or your fears, must have a home there.” – Tom Disch, from On Wings of Song On the SF Signal Podcast this [...]
Of Jetpack Utopias and Hyperbolic Tomorrows: David Graeber and the Science Fiction Imagination
“[J]etpacks and flying cars symbolize the gap between our imagination and our ability to impose our imagination upon our world.” – from You Call This The [...]
Why We Need To Imagine The Impossible
“Fortunately somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or [...]
The Bradbury Effect > The Amazon Effect
“”[R]eaders care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix [...]
Diversion and Immersion: Escapism and the Reading of Fantastika
“ESCAPISM: The desire to retreat into imaginative entertainment rather than deal with the stress, tedium, and daily problems of the mundane world.” – (via [...]
The Problem of the Idealized Reader in Fantastika
“The ‘deficient reading protocol’ is a comforting explanation, and like all comforting explanations, should be regarded with some suspicion.” – [...]
The Bellowing Ogre: 12 Excogitations on the Reading of Fantastika
“All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.” – Alberto Manguel I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head this week, so I thought that I [...]
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