The SFnal Comforts of Being an Apocalypst
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the [...]
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the bellowing ogre
Six Fervently-Held Hypotheses Regarding “Willing Suspension of Disbelief”
“He could not map the alterity he felt.” – China Miéville, Iron Council “I don’t really think that ‘disbelief’ is an action, [...]
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 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 [...]
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] 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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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