Back in the High Middle Ages, a literary form developed (well, many literary forms developed, but I'm interested in one): the chivalric romance. Most English-speakers get little contact with the form, unless they're specialists (the main example in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; most of the examples of the form are in French and the ( Read more... )

Somewhere back near the beginning of time (it sometimes feels like) I took a graduate seminar on Landscape and Literature, with a focus mainly on the 18th Century (although the 19th and 20th centuries did get a look in). It was not as interesting as it might have been -- the professor, Leo Braudy, was not noted for the excitement he generated -- ( Read more... )

Imagine that, sometime before all the media hype and before the creation of the derivative fantasy genre (say in the late 1950s), you sat down to read The Lord of the Rings with no spoilers, and you were a few chapters into it (say, at the end of "A Shortcut to Mushrooms"). Would you have any real idea of what was to come next ( Read more... )

The original formulation of "willing suspension of disbelief" was by Coleridge, talking about writing poems regarding the supernatural. It was picked up (to my recollection) by Lin Carter in the early 1970's to talk about fantasy and has become generalized within the SFF community ( Read more... )

Nicola Griffith's Hild is a very well-done historical novel, in the sense that it deals fairly well with the historical novelist's dilemma and does not just give us modern people in a mediaeval dress. (Many if not most historical novels do.) It is also a well-written novel, with well-rounded characters, good prose, and a measured pace. I look ( Read more... )

There are, I think, three archetypal relations of consumers of literary works to the works in question ( Read more... )

There's an article over at tor.com regarding moral ambiguity in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is mildly interesting -- even though my reaction is "not so much ( Read more... )

For all those disliking the Redshirts Hugo win: have you really looked at the competition?  Although there have been nominations for both of its predecessors, Blackout represents a subgenre which only some fans read at all; Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is a weak representative of stronger predecessors; the Robinson seems to be deeply polarizing -- ( Read more... )

... except, of course, it's not.  They've chosen one novel per author.  In reality, it would be bizarre to expect that the very best novelists wrote only one of the top 100 novels.  (Also, their choices sometimes seem to me to be questionable ( Read more... )

I recently finished the Mass Market Paperback of David Weber's War Maid's ChoiceInside that novel there is a good slim novel trying to get out.  If you're good at skimming and are familiar with how Weber writes you can actually get close to reading it ( Read more... )