I am not going to link to that diatribe that's been making the rounds for a while now, about how you can no longer judge an sff book by its cover* and just because something has a dragon on it may not be about a mighty-thewed hero defeating the dragon, the mighty-thewed hero may be in the moral position of the trophy hunter pursuing the last ( Read more... )

I did this quiz on FaceBook - 100 Top Sci Fi Books List Challenge - scoring an above average of 54 -
And then the internet ate my posting of it with snarky comment that the reason for this level of success was that it was largely writers who would have been on the shelves of the local public library at the era when I was reading relatively ( Read more... )

Am fairly brayne-ded this pm (the packing-archives saga that will not die reprised, oh hai, Sisyphus!), but I spotted this in a piece somebody linked about some male YA author responding to Y NO GURLZ in his books? I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all. I have a daughter now; she’s 17. When she was born, that was the first girl I ( Read more... )

Have been thinking (and may have whinged about this before) about the narrow range of Actual Historical Figures who keep on bloody cropping up in alt-history fantasy.
John Dee - your all-purpose early modern magic practitioner.
The Duke of Wellington - all over any alt-Napoleonic Wars.
Sir Richard Burton - okay, I know he was hyper-energetic, but ( Read more... )

I commented once (at least) that there are certain sf tropes that literary types are allowed to do, and it's quite okay to be dystopic or apocalyptic, providing you at no point introduce a spaceship or a talking squid. Plus, the mood should be, on the whole, grim.

(Naomi Mitchison of course completely ignored any such strictures and had spaceships ( Read more... )

Okay, I realise that I already missed Stir-Up Sunday, which was last week, but it's more than high time to switch over to my bah humbug seasonal icon, right?

Passing over with a wince and a sigh a double-header of exploded factoids about those weird Victorians and their sex lives: review of that Vibrator Play that takes it for Based On Utterly Troo ( Read more... )

I've been given to think by a discussion in a locked post on LJ about friendship and people who claim that they can't somehow really be friends with persons of the same/opposite sex.

Okay, there is that whole pernicious trope of 'wymmynz b backstabbing bitches to one another', and that other one that cross-gender friendships, at least if the ( Read more... )

At the weekend, we watched a DVD of 42nd Street (1933), which, do admit, cliche city, though maybe it is where the cliches came from?

But, imagine my delighted surprise when the Ginger Rogers chorus-girl character ('The only time she ever said no, she hadn't heard the question') is being put forward by the backer to take over from the unfortunately ( Read more... )

Given that it had been raining drearily and relentlessly all day and showed no signs of stopping, I bailed on the walk and took an earlier train.

However, I did get in my steam-room and plunge, and a whoosh in the hydro bath (they have now fixed the hydro pump, yay).

It was always pretty much intended to be about the rest and the relaxation and ( Read more... )

Musing over two of the panels I was on at Wiscon which possibly needed to be one panel - the Changing Reading Tastes Over One's Lifespan and What Do You Never Need to See Again, because the latter is pretty much predicated on having been exposed to a fair amount of narrative over time, and the former may well lead to 'And I never want to see an elf ( Read more... )