I’ve heard a theory-I forget who originally floated it-that the length of the average mass-market genre fiction work has gone way up due to two things: the demands of the market and the invention of the word processor.
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Queen’s Blade’s is an adventure story with the plot of a fighting game, the heart of an X-rated dating sim, and no brain to split between them. It comes straight out of the same chainmail-bikini school of post-feminist storytelling that...
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Paul Greengrass (of United 93, but not of Watchmen) has, in my opinion quite wisely, turned down a chance to direct the remake of Fantastic Voyage.

Fred Pohl talked about the movie in his Science Fiction: Studies in Film, way back when, and I was surprised to find it had been changed drastically from its original concept. Jerome Bixby (of Star ( Read more... )

Friends of mine got to arguing the other day about what the hell happened to fantasy fiction, about how it had all turned into boring multi-volume epics and Tolkien-derived trash. I gave my opinion like so: Yes, a lot of this is due to Tolkien becoming canonized, meaning that people see him as being the model for this sort of thing. But how we got ( Read more... )

I haven't read the Twilight books. I probably never will, at this rate. After all the negative press from people whose tastes I trust, the well has been poisoned so thoroughly that not even a Superfund cleanup would help.

What I have heard about the books set off alarm bells all up and down my critical faculties, so you can imagine my surprise ( Read more... )