"You've picked the losing side of a battle that's already won, girl."
Been far too long. Busier than ever, new ventures, new efforts and LJ is pretty much dead anyway.
Still. I cannot let a year pass without updating my yearlusts such as they are.
This year's is supernatural fiction starring black folk. I've seen the particular genre called Afro-surrealism by some but I call it magical negro fiction. You know, starring the magical fucking negro -- and not her white sidekick. It's pretty cool. You've got Nnedi Okorafor with Lagoon and Who Fears Death and Akata Witch and you've got Ayize Jama-Everett with his Liminal books and Hannibal Tabu's The Crown and of course, the ur-creator of the genre, Octavia Butler.
The most interesting thing to me in what they do is taking the powers we are all so familiar with (the strength, the speed, the flight) from Avengers and X-Men and Marvel and DC and Wildstorm and so on -- and making them strange again simply by the act of putting them in different hands. I exaggerate, of course; it is not simple but it is explicable. Take those powers and root them in mythology that slips beneath your feet like sand in the Dreamtime instead of over-explained pseudo-science that we've seen far too much of anyway. Root the powers in archetypes and hazy liminal weirdness so that they become icebergs shrouded in fog in waters on an alien planet.
Lagoon does this very well by shearing away the distinctions between alien and spirit, nanotech and magic, invasion and reawakening. Jama-Everett does it with X-Men types whose powers are inexplicable even to the people who claim to know, powers that put them in the same royal courts as the gods themselves -- and then has those gods actually exist as unknowably vast beings.
And that's my yearlust for 2015.
PS
Taggert's power is fucking bullshit. Seriously, ranged biomancy that lets him heal or harm with equal effort AND he can heal himself? WTFHAX PLS NERF :D
Still. I cannot let a year pass without updating my yearlusts such as they are.
This year's is supernatural fiction starring black folk. I've seen the particular genre called Afro-surrealism by some but I call it magical negro fiction. You know, starring the magical fucking negro -- and not her white sidekick. It's pretty cool. You've got Nnedi Okorafor with Lagoon and Who Fears Death and Akata Witch and you've got Ayize Jama-Everett with his Liminal books and Hannibal Tabu's The Crown and of course, the ur-creator of the genre, Octavia Butler.
The most interesting thing to me in what they do is taking the powers we are all so familiar with (the strength, the speed, the flight) from Avengers and X-Men and Marvel and DC and Wildstorm and so on -- and making them strange again simply by the act of putting them in different hands. I exaggerate, of course; it is not simple but it is explicable. Take those powers and root them in mythology that slips beneath your feet like sand in the Dreamtime instead of over-explained pseudo-science that we've seen far too much of anyway. Root the powers in archetypes and hazy liminal weirdness so that they become icebergs shrouded in fog in waters on an alien planet.
Lagoon does this very well by shearing away the distinctions between alien and spirit, nanotech and magic, invasion and reawakening. Jama-Everett does it with X-Men types whose powers are inexplicable even to the people who claim to know, powers that put them in the same royal courts as the gods themselves -- and then has those gods actually exist as unknowably vast beings.
And that's my yearlust for 2015.
PS
Taggert's power is fucking bullshit. Seriously, ranged biomancy that lets him heal or harm with equal effort AND he can heal himself? WTFHAX PLS NERF :D