On the YA fantasy front, author Rosamund Hodge has been making quite a splash with her moody, dark, intensely atmospheric reworkings of myths and fairy tales. So when I had the chance to review this collection, Desires and Dreams and Powers, I pounced ( Read more... )

In 1971, sf and f scholar Thomas Clareson had some still-relevant insights into the sudden explosion of sf and f some five years previous. With a few quotes from his essay, I throw out a couple of ideas about why it happened. I'd love to discuss what you thing about why it happened. Here is the link.

I curved this post around Robert Jackson Bennett's two Divine Cities novels. Yes? No? Maybe? Snore?

A lot of excellent comments to my last post, as I'd hoped. There was one portion of autopope's superlative advice about covers, etc, that I misread, and was talking over with rachelmanija yesterday.

He said:
. . . For example, portal fantasies need to begin in the first thousand words, not wait 2-3 chapters. If you can do an in media res opening without confusing the ( Read more... )

These seem to be a new thing, right? The earliest I could think of is Mark Sumner's The Devil's Tower, but in the last years or so there have been several, beginning with Emma Bull's Territory, about Tombstone. I have Rae Carson's lovely new series, and Laura Anne Gilman's Siver on the Road (which I have not yet read)--are there others?

Over here, a short, tightly written story set in Kerr's urban fantasy version of San Francisco. She's written four books about Nola O'Grady, her noir detective with license to ensorcell. This, I think, serves as a splendid introduction to those.

Deborah J. Ross talks about it over at BVC in what I thought was a thought-provoking post.

I have been reading the StoryBundle I have a story in, and finding a wide variety of works listed under the "epic fantasy" umbrella, prompting a look at the works, and definitions. I would love to talk about both.

I took a look at two new fantasies, Uprooted and Crimson Bound that contain some remarkably similar elements, but which are vastly different books. I would love to discuss these books and pastoral fantasy. (Especially--she said cautiously--as life is slowly returning to his regular rhythms.)

Ursula K. Le Guin levels her gaze at Kazuo Ishiguro.