Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
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This did not end up being the July issue, as I had hoped it would be; life continues, in its various ways, to confound our plans. Our next issue should be out at the beginning of September, though, and I hope that we can return to something like our previous Rube Goldberg clockwork precision.
As an Argentine science fiction writer working out of Buenos Aires, I envy writers based in large markets. I personally have the advantage that my first language, reading- and writing-wise, is and always has been English, but many of my countrymen need to learn to write in the tongue of Shakespeare or face the stark realities of publishing in Spanish.
Due to its being a tiny market, comparatively speaking, the Argentine publication process for debut or little-known writers consists of approaching a publishing house that will invariably be delighted to publish your award-winning manuscript ... as long as you foot the bill. Yog’s Law (“Money flows to the writer”) is notably absent in any serious publishing conversation here. This reality is reflected in the often uneven quality of the work published in South America: nuggets of genius have to be mined from a quantity of dross produced by people whose only meaningful qualification was that they simply had the funds to get it done at that particular moment in time.
A Particular Magic: Two Books from Ellen Klages
In a printed book, words can press together like a kiss or line up into a story. It’s all a matter of how the pages are folded or divided. It’s a particular bit of everyday paper magic that allows us to open up worlds.
In a similar way, Ellen Klages has combined physics and magic in not one but two books published during the turbulent spring of 2017. More than that, Passing Strange, a novella from Tor.com publishing, and Wicked Wonders, a collection of short stories from Tachyon Publications, seem at first glance to be entirely separate entities, but they, too, connect when folded properly.
Continue reading "Read This: recently read and recommended by Fran Wilde" »
Though I haven’t done official research, for years I’ve thought of Rose Madder (1995) as underappreciated among King’s novels, just based on conversations with fellow academics and other friends. I can think of some reasons for it getting less attention than it deserves. It came during a very uneven period of King’s career in which it seemed that masterpieces—or at least strong works of character, social commentary, and improving writerly technique—alternated in no predictable way with ambitious disasters: for instance, Misery followed by The Tommyknockers. Above all, attention during that period focused increasingly on the Dark Tower books and the tendrils they sent out to unite the series with King’s other fiction. While Rose Madder is connected to the Dark Tower metaworld, the connection is easy to miss, unlike in Insomnia, his novel before Rose Madder. And who knows how important it is to Rose Madder’s fame that, unlike most of King’s best novels and many of his lesser works, Rose Madder has never been filmed? (A film is rumored to be in production, but this talk goes back at least to 2011.)
Continue reading "Bernadette Bosky: On Rereading Stephen King’s Rose Madder" »
1. Legends of Maps
Once upon a time, mapmakers who came to the edge of their knowledge did not leave the terra incognita beyond simply blank; instead, they filled the empty quarters with images of lions and monsters and at least once, on a 1504 globe made of conjoined halves of ostrich eggs, the inscription “Hic sunt dracones,” or in English, “Here are dragons” (Livingston 2002)1. A literary cartographer, trying to survey the genres that spread across the landscape of story and coming upon the one called fantasy, might well be tempted to throw up their hands over a terrain so confused, various and wild, and simply say, along with the antique globe, “Here are dragons.”
Continue reading "“Here Are Dragons”: Charting the Depths and Borders of Fantasy" »
