Because I've been trying to figure out how comp titles work for fifteen years, and it ain't happening.

Can anybody name me fairly recent science fiction novels (ideally decent sellers but not top award winners) that have any of the following characteristics or something along similar lines:

* A colonized protagonist who's been indoctrinated to ( Read more... )

Night of the Living Dead (1968): I'd actually never seen this before, and for anyone else similarly uneducated in zombie film history, I won't spoil it but will just say watch it. It is sadly as timely in its social commentary in 2021 as in 1968.

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957): I had zero expectations for this film and merely watched it ( Read more... )

Asphodel has started a thread at the Mirage forum for volume 10 discussion, and I thought I'd crosspost my random thoughts here too, as I reread this volume for the first time in years. Asphodel is currently doing an amazing job re-translating it, but I'm a little ahead of her translation and rereading the earlier version by Tasha Poisonous, who ( Read more... )

So I'm a tough sell for a Dune movie. Not only am I fan of the book (though I confess I have not reread it in years), but I grew up on the David Lynch movie, and imperfect (and somewhat unfairly maligned) though it is, it has a place in my heart that is hard to dislodge. I was also not hugely sanguine about the performances in Villeneuve's movie ( Read more... )

I have just finished the novel Master and Commander, the first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, and I can assert O'Brian has a new fan. I had attempted this series before, 15-20 years ago when my dad was obsessed with it, and it didn't grab me. I guess sometimes the time has to be right. I wanted to write a big essay on it, but ( Read more... )

Happy to announce my modern-day Peter Pan story, "Lila," has been accepted for Dragon Soul Press's forthcoming anthology, Timeless 2: twists on fairy tales. Many thanks to fellow Peter Pan story writer Melissa Snark for catalyzing this story via Indie Artist Press's proposed Peter Pan anthology. That project ended up not happening, but I'm jazzed ( Read more... )

(Light spoilers for Banana Fish)

I love a lot of things about the manga Banana Fish, and one of them is the fact that it's set in the USA. I particularly enjoy that the character of Ash, like me, is white American. The reason is basically this: a character like Ash helps me spring free of imaginative false dichotomy between American Exceptionalist ( Read more... )

On a friend's recommendation, I have just finished Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins (1971), a postmodern, late Southern Gothic novel I'd call nominally science fiction in that it is set in the very near future (from the 1970s) and has speculative technology and social changes, but only as a thin veneer for talking about contemporary life. It ( Read more... )

It amazes me how relieved I feel after Biden's inauguration.

The past four years I have devoted so much work to dissociating my own sense of wellness from the craziness going on in my country's national politics. In fact, I think this has been one piece of the larger work of dissociating my wellness from external signals in general. It's part of ( Read more... )

This is ramble (okay, rant) about why I may be responding as I am to Wonder Woman: 1984 (liked it okay) and Discovery, especially S3 (kind of hate it). I am socially on the left but increasingly find my responses to pop culture out of step with some of the more prominent left-leaning responses. To wit, Wonder Woman is being panned and most of the ( Read more... )