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Where I wish Redshirts had gone
In trying to identify where John Scalzi’s Redshirts went wrong for me as a reader, I should first establish that at some point it was going right, which means owning up to the fact that I went into the...
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Reading for Writers: The Tigress of Forli
While reading Elizabeth Lev’s biography of Caterina Sforza The Tigress of Forli, I realized that I was just as interested in the quieter aspects of Sforza’s life as the big dramatic events and aspects...
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Time and POV in Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship,...
There is nothing genre about Alice Munro. The author and her work are one of the key nodes of modern literary fiction. The perfect detail. The minor epiphany. The mundane realism. Even if you’ve never...
View ArticleAlan Jacobs on the emergence of the fantasy genre
The essay needs to be read in full for this quote to be clear, but I feel the need to document it: But again, the desire for a world resonant with spiritual meaning, of one kind or another, does not...
View ArticleTwo lines from Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority
Back when I read Annihilation, the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy, I posted the line that hooked me into the novel, that convinced me that I was all in for the ride. I...
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Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick
It has now been over a month since I finished Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick, the second novel in his Tales of the Kin series. I wasn’t planning on writing about it because, although I liked it, I...
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Power and the fantasy genre
Most fantasy works (also many strains of science fiction, of course) are explorations of power, especially power of the great or unusual variety: where does it reside? How can it be gained? How can it...
View ArticleGuest post at Bookworm Blues, etc.
I have a guest post at Bookworm Blues today that’s on three fantasy novels from 2014 that reward patient readers. I’m delighted that Sarah was willing to give me a slot on her blog and hope you all...
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Reader expectations and Ancillary Sword, Hawk, The Peripheral and The Slow...
Reader expectations are a blessing and a bane to both readers and authors. To authors because they can either productively constrain or unproductively overwhelm the writing process. To readers because...
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County Doctor, a translation of Kafka’s Ein Landarzt for the American West
Image credit: Neenah History, flickr The following is a translation of Franz Kafka’s short story “Ein Landarzt” that I did in the summer of 2004. I publish it here so that I have a more permanent...
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An SFnalish mistranslation of Part 1:I from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
Beech Tree by Achille-Etna Michallon; Thaw Collection, Jointly Owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Eugene V. Thaw, 2009 A tree of immense clarity arose....
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27 Ways of Looking at Genre
Image: Barnbrook. Licensed under the Creative Commons NonCommercial Share-Alike license. 1. We talk of genre boundaries as if they’re electric fences and not softened butter. 2. We talk of genre...
View ArticleSafeForge
SafeForge Incident Report INCIDENT CATEGORY: Death(s) COMMENT: Everyone (except me) LOCATION:SafeForge (the entire station) COMMENT:SafeForge is an orbital station converted from an asteroid in the...
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How Sofia Samatar complicates the Bildungsroman in A Stranger in Olondria
Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria overflows with storytelling, textual and oral. Jevick is always remembering a bit of text or playing audience for another character’s urge to share with him a...
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preserve
Photo by Angela Morris return to preserve that perfect moment return with a crust of salt, a cloud of smoke, a cube of ice, a cruet of vinegar, a crock of butter of duck fat of varnish of piss return...
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Zangwill’s The Master on Art
The front cover of Hennepin County Library’s first edition copy of Zangwill’s The Master Published in 1895, Israel Zangwill’s The Master is a Künstlerroman about a teenage boy in Nova Scotia who...
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Two brief excerpts from Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self
Detail from the front cover of Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self Quentin Anderson’s The Imperial Self is the kind of idiosyncratic literary criticism by white men trying to say something about...
View ArticleTwitter bots I will never get around to making
Henry Rick James Preposition of the Day Jane Austen in Austin [Jane Austen is (-ing verb) at (Austin location)] TheNewspapersWereRight [(X) was general all over (X)] Lovecraft Sells Amway Maltify...
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“Literary” SF&F and self-publishing: quantitative results
Many thanks to all of you who took my survey on “Literary” SF&F and self-publishing novel length fiction. As of earlier today when I turned the survey off there were 32 total respondents. That’s...
View Article“Literary” SF&F and self-publishing: qualitative results
In a previous post, I presented the qualitative results of my survey of self-publishing and literary SF&F. Quite a few respondents also provided comments. Because some were okay with me quoting...
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