Book Review: The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
Brooke Bolander jumps from stories to novellas with The Only Harmless Great Thing, her #Tordotcompublishing novella. The novella is a strongly affecting and moving story that proves that her emotional strengths in reaching an audience do translate from her short stories to novella length. Brooke Bolander first came to my literary attention with “Our Talons can […]
Month of Joy: La Alegría del Lenguaje by Cassandra Rose Clarke
A year ago, I decided to embark on a not-exactly-new endeavor: teaching myself Spanish. I say not-exactly-new because I had attempted it before with a dubiously-acquired copy of Rosetta Stone, which I used for about a month in 2013 before giving up. My failures with Rosetta Stone hadn’t killed my desire to learn Spanish, though. […]
Guest Post: The Importance of Words by Jeffery Viles
Words are not just important, they are the key invention of Homo sapiens, which separates us by miles from the other animals here on planet earth. With our complex languages and hundreds of thousands of words, we describe things we can see and touch and things we only imagine. What is in front of us […]
Around the Podosphere #13: Podcasts of Note for June 24
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted one of these. Since the Skiffy and Fanty crew collectively listen to more podcasts than there are episodes of our show (totally scientific, promise), it’s about time we brought the Around the Podosphere back to share some of the goodness worming its way into our ears. So, […]
Languages Matter: Some Thoughts on Language and Dialect
I want to expand on what I have written in my essay, “Languages, Dialects and Accents: Why Our Voices Matter.” Much has been said about the use of dialect in science fiction and the outcry that follows. I would like to see more of such discussions because we have been shying away from issues that […]
Language in the Written Word
The Philippines is home to more than a hundred languages (and that’s not counting the number of dialects). But there are only two official languages in the country: English and Filipino. The official languages, especially Filipino (a lot of which is based on the Tagalog language), is always the subject of debate. And both languages […]
