“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 [...]
“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 [...]
“[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.” – [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
“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 [...]
“[A]ny existential statement – a statement, for example, beginning ‘Once upon a time there was…’ – always implies a world, because it implies a universal [...]