A short while back, I was in a situation where the only book on hand to read was a novel by somebody I'd never read nor heard of, of that genre that is hard to nail down, the quasi-mystery novel which is often called "suspense" or "thriller" but which would be most accurately called "serial-killer fear porn" in most cases - they were very big ( Read more... )

Emperors - not new in the blogosphere, but ancient in internet time, and perhaps new to some of the whippersnappers out here.

ETA: Oh, and "oil baron" , as "robber baron" is totally not a figure of speech, any more than it ever was in the Gilded Age...

(xpost to/fro dKos)

Y'all know how I followed up an aside on golliwogs with a request for decoding cryptic 20-year-old coded British racism, the other day? The reason that "gollies" and that surreal little episode in a London kitchen - yes, the Robertson's thing was a helpful factoid, it made sense (sort of) of the out-of-nowhereness, because we were having lunch, and ( Read more... )

A while back I subbed to the Powell's Review A Day Newsletter, which sometimes tells me about books I'd be interested in reading, though more often does not. But sometimes the commentary in the reviews - which seem to be chosen from a fairly small pool, by a sorting algorithm I cannot fathom - is itself of interest. Which is not always a good thing ( Read more... )

Looking up the reference on the New Coke fiasco in the book I have which mentions it (You Did What?), I came across something else I'd bookmarked to post about sometime.

I don't have the time to write about it in depth just now, but it's one of those things that I don't remember seeing anything blogged about it previously, so this is a start:

( Read more... )

--To write a novel version of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, but from Nemo's POV.

It isn't like there isn't precedent for this sort of thing, after all. Nor as though Verne himself didn't engage in meta-textuality regarding that novel itself, casting it as a published - and therefore subject to editing errors as well as unreliable narration - ( Read more... )

Or, Did Alan Moore even read Jules Verne?

The theme of this year's International Blog Against Racism is "Intersectionality" which ought to be a snap for me, but as usual I'm behind and disorganized but thanks to shewhohashope and oyceter both posting about steampunk and colonialism, I remembered something which I've been meaning to try to examine in greater detail, ( Read more... )

Big surprise, this:

via Tobias Buckell again, I see this a.m. that Sanders has:
1. Minitrued his 'pantiwadulous' insult to Yoon Ha Lee and Nora Jemisin, in keeping with his rep for doing this - apparently unaware that people who get reps for retconning their faux pas also get screencaps;

2. Has now decided that he's going to charge people $40 to ( Read more... )

If I were to construct a scene, one of those humorous sketches perhaps, in which a media gatekeeper praises a writer for being courageous and perceptive enough to portray their story's villain as utterly one-dimensional, lacking in any tragic virtues whatsoever, without any personal motivation other than his essential evilness, when said villain is ( Read more... )

I have to say, I am a little surprised at all the suggestions of the Vulcan non-interference proto-Prime-Directive being posited as examples of the Ming-the-Merciful "liberating" conquest of Earth with saucers and death-rays and giant robots and powered battle armor, moving into "Destroy the planet to save it" territory ( Read more... )