Now that Hugo voting is finally available online, I'm going to post about a few categories over the next few days. I'm involved with the administration of the awards again this year, so I won't be revealing my exact rankings; back to my normal procedure next year.
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Other things being equal, I wold have been looking forward to Eastercon at the end of this week - a welcome return to the Birmingham Hilton where I have had various good times over the years. The last few times I attended Eastercon I got (not very reluctantly) roped into counting the votes for the BSFA Awards; the voting deadline this year has now ( Read more... )

Fantasy is not so much a mansion as a row of terraced houses, such as the one that entranced us in C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew with its connecting attics, each with a door that leads into another world.
One of this year's Hugo nominees for Best Related Work, this is an excellent set of essays on various aspects of the fantasy literature, ( Read more... )

An excellent, thorough look at the works of the much-missed author, taking us through how Jones educates her readers subtly through her writing, which made me want to fill in the large gaps in my own reading of her works. By fortunate coincidence, the Diana Wynne Jones issue of Vector arrived just as I was finishing this, which gave me a chance to ( Read more... )

This book is precisely what it says on the tin, with a first chapter taking the genre to 1900, a second taking it to 1950, and then individual chapters for each subsequent decade, with two extra chapters for a) J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and b) Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett, the whole text weighing in at less than 220 pages ( ( Read more... )

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four different ways in which fantasy writers engage with their book (and their readers). First is the portal / quest fantasy, where the hero leaves his or her normality to enter a fantasy world on a heroic journey. Second, the immersive fantasy, which is entirely set within an imagined world. ( Read more... )

20) The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, ed. Andrew M Butler and Farah Mendlesohn ( Read more... )

10) Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn ( Read more... )

Well, I can't do the alphabet meme going around the Dublin folks due to not having a bra size. So instead I'll do Farah Mendlesohn's survey of what SF I read as a child, following on from coalescent here, papersky here, and yhlee here.

( Children's SF survey )

Cheryl Morgan has a nice line in the latest Emerald City, that "most American claims to admire Celtic culture are on a similar level to telling someone from India that you really love that wonderfully authentic Indian writer, Mr. Kipling ( Read more... )