More Than Warriors: Thoughts on Fantasy and Gender
‘”Populating a world with men, with male heroes, male people, and their ‘women cattle and slaves’ is a political act. You are making a conscious [...]
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Articles by John H. Stevens
Escape Has A Destination But It’s Never Far Away
“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 [...]
The Bellowing Ogre: Exhaustion Is An Opportunity To Gather Your Wits And Strength
“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 Event of Fantastika
“[R]eading is as much a strategic enterprise as the work itself. To read, then, is to engage in one set of strategies in order to decipher another set.” – [...]
Signs of Life in Recent Short Fantastika from Elizabeth Hand, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Karin Tidbeck
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 [...]
The Notion of Epic Fantasy And The Dreams It Offers
“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 [...]
Neologisms, Pseudowords, & The Pleasures of Deviant Language in Fantastika
“All fantastic genres make some use of fictive neology. Heroic fantasy invents words to evoke the archaic origins of its worlds. Phantasmagoric satire delights in [...]
BOOK REVIEW: Son of Destruction by Kit Reed
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Dan Carteret is determined to solve the mystery of his father’s identity. But he discovers a lot more than that when his pursuit takes him to his [...]
My Hugo Choices: A Mildly Odd Misadventure, With Some Observations About the Lessons of Fiction
On Monday the latest SF Signal Podcast went live, and I was on it. The topic: 2013 Hugo Ballot Suggestions. With January 31st the deadline for joining LoneStarCon to be [...]
[The Bellowing Ogre] World Building’s Fictions
“There is something strangely self-undermining about the idea of utopia. Since we can speak of what transcends the present only in the language of the present, we risk [...]
[The Bellowing Ogre] Where The Gaze Lingers
Last week’s column was a discussion of the best books of the past two centuries, and it got me thinking about the usefulness of such lists. Since this is my last column [...]
BOOK REVIEW: Goodbye Babylon by Seb Doubinsky
REVIEW SUMMARY: A subversive, sometimes lunatic series of incursions that raid the intersections of desire, fear, and resilience to reflect on what makes us human and [...]
“The Best of the Centuries” – Reflections on What Makes A Story Important
“I am not with you when you read. The voice you hear is your own. I am giving you a frame: you are the one imbuing it with beauty.” – Robert Jackson Bennett [...]
The Con Panel: Its Uses and Limitations
A few weeks ago I attended Darkover Grand Council Meeting, a Science Fiction/Fantasy convention held in the Baltimore area. This was the con’s 35th year and it offered [...]
This Strange and Mercurial World: Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot Palace
After talking so abstractly about criticism last week, I felt that delving into a book was necessary for this week’s column. My choice is Jeffrey Ford’s Crackpot [...]
Achieving Critical Mass: Some Thoughts on the Art and Use of Fantastic Criticism
“As a critic I am not in the business of providing purchasing advice, but neither am I in the business of attempting to read the author’s mind by establishing the [...]
Why We Need Impossible Worlds
“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.” [...]
Seven “Non-Genre” Books That Would Stimulate Readers of Fantastika
“And so life started to become an adventure, in a way we had never known before.” – Gregor von Rezzori I’m shifting gears this week to get a bit more [...]
The Future is Not a Land of Enchantment: On SF’s “Exhaustion”
“I do not think I could write SF if I were not disenchanted with large areas of the field. Those areas of disenchantment are precisely the interesting interfaces where [...]
The Bellowing Ogre: Here Or Else
“[A]ny existential statement – a statement, for example, beginning ‘Once upon a time there was…’ – always implies a world, because it implies a universal [...]
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