Confessions of a Comics Junkie: Identity, Obsessions, and Everything
I buy quite a lot of comics — probably not as many as some, but enough that my collection has started to get a little overwhelming. There are currently two long boxes of comics in my closet. Full. And on top of those long boxes are two stacks of comics that are likely to fill a third long box. That’s a lot of comics to have collected in only a few months. Lucky for me, I am good at finding deals, and my local comic guy gives me a discount on new comics if I pre-order them.[1] On top of that, I easily read fifty or sixty comics a month when I’m busy. Right now, I’m 11 comics into Marvel’s The Ultimates, which I mostly read during the shortest third leg of my flight from Florida to California.[2][3] On a good month, I can go through a crossover event or two in a week — Flashpoint and Avengers vs. X-Men events took me less than a week each. [4] So not only am I buying the heck out of comics, I’m also reading them
My Superpower: Adrian Reynolds
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Adrian Reynolds to talk about how the power of selective stupidity relates to White Lily, an upcoming SF short film. ————————————————————— Hi, I’m Adrian Reynolds, and I’m selectively stupid. Not generally stupid, but specifically stupid around some stuff – like science. Which, seeing as some of what I write is science fiction, could be thought of as limiting. Actually, it’s not: being selectively stupid is my superpower. I caught online comments from some people who’d seen Gravity and were dismissive of the physics. Me? My mouth was open the whole time. That’s called awe by the way, not snoring. And why? Well, I don’t need an in-depth understanding of science to be blown away by an awesome film. And
Adventures in Teaching: Trauma and Realism in (Some) Weird Novels
Today was the last day of teaching for my survey course in American Literature. As with all my literature courses, I included quite a few works of SF/F on the reading list, from “classic” SF like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to contemporary weirdness like Flight by Sherman Alexie. This year, I realized there were a few unintentional trends in the works I’d selected. First, almost every text I had my students read directly or indirectly addressed sex. I’m not going to talk about that today, except to say that my students and I were quite amused that our small representation of American Literature seemed to suggest that all American Literature will talk about sex at some point. That’s probably not true, but it’s amusing nonetheless. The more interesting unintentional theme is that of trauma and its representation through weirdness / magical realism / anti-realism. This became apparent only recently, when we finished reading Flight by Sherman Alexie, a definitively non-realist novel about a time traveling / body-switching Native American foster kid who must discover himself through a myriad of other people’s experiences. As the last novel for the course, it resonated quite well with several of the other recent texts, something I hadn’t expected at the time. The angst and blunt honesty of the main character, Zits, on
LitBits: The Politics of Author/Work Separation
I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, firstly for some obvious reasons (a certain movie) and secondly because of some of the things I’ve been discussing with my students in my American Literature course. And one of the questions that keeps coming up for me is this: how do we know when we have crossed the line by holding a writer accountable for the controversial things they write? As an example, I am currently teaching Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers. This particular novel is not all that controversial, though it certainly has its issues, but her later book, Blu’s Hanging, was the cause of much controversy in 1997/1998. The Asian American Studies National Book Award she received was later annulled after public outcry; many critics and academics have written about the incident since.[1] One of the problems Asian American (and other) critics had with the book was its representation of Filipinos in Hawai’i (they are dirty, morally questionable, violent, and/or pedophiles) and the complete absence of indigenous Hawaiians in the novel. Effectively, critics charged Yamanaka with failing to self-censor herself in a stereotypical context; in
Out-Brutalling the Last Guy: “Grim and gritty, yes … but make sure it’s doing some honest work” by K.V. Johansen
I’ve written some reasonably grim stuff. The hero of Blackdog does tend to go for the throat on the battlefield and the assassin hero in my forthcoming series, Marakand, has a past that is decidedly Not Nice (his present just gets worse). Violence, horror, fear, pain, death — these are all part of epic fantasy, which almost by definition is going to deal with war at some point along the way and will certainly throw its characters into nasty situations, both as active doers of deeds and as suffering victims. Sometimes detailed physical description is what you need to do what the story needs done. Sometimes it isn’t. When it is, the detailed physical description alone shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. I was talking about this just last night with the Spouse, and then, while procrastinating on Twitter this morning, I wandered into a conversation with Juliet E. McKenna and Tom Lloyd that touched on the same ideas. This led me to wonder if, as we see the increased brutality inflicted in books praised as some kind of standard that is supposed to be achieved, we fantasy writers don’t sometimes get the feeling that we’d
Recommended Reads for October 2013
Recommended Reads is a monthly feature in which the Skiffy and Fanty crew tell you about one thing they recently read that they think you might like too. Here are their picks: Shaun Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit Books: Oct. 2013) To say that a lot of people are talking about this book is an understatement. Yet, the amount of buzz Leckie has received for Ancillary Justice, her debut novel, is deserved. This is the kind of military SF / space opera a lot of us have been waiting for. From the first pages, the novel tears down our comfortable notions of self and gender, pulls apart language to display its arbitrary construction in relation to culture, and shoves us right smack dab in the middle of a sprawling, reminiscent empire. It’s the kind of novel that my geek side can squee about without end…oh, hell, my academic side is doing that too. If you’re looking for
