Blog Posts

Geekomancer Under Glass — Video Games I Want To Play

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Hello all! This is Mike, your resident Geekomancer. Thanks to my novel contracts, my free time to *be* a geek has been lessened. I’ve had to make some tough leisure time choices, and more often than not, video games lose out, since it’s easier for me to sit back and absorb some narrative via TV and film. My friend Gregory A. Wilson has figured out a great way to have his cake and eat it too. He broadcasts his video gaming on Twitch TV, a broadcasting system. Through his stream, I’ve discovered a number of great video games that I desperately want to play, but haven’t made time. And all of this in a Golden Age of independent video game design. Therefore, I’m going to sublimate some of my yearning into this blog, and do my best to add to Skiffy & Fanty readers’ T0-Be-Played pile:

Announcements and Errata

Top 10 Blog Posts and Episodes for January 2014

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It’s officially February, which means it’s time to let you know what was popular over the last 31 days. Here are the top 10 episodes: Episode 4.2 — Torture Cinema Meets The Wicker Man 186. Israeli Publishing and Translation w/ Didi Chanoch & Rani Graff (World SF Tour) 187. Lavie Tidhar (a.k.a. NYC P.I.) — The Violent Century (2013) (An Interview) 189. Our Favorite Things from 2013 (A Roundtable Discussion) #12 — The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) — A Shoot the WISB Discussion 188. Shimon Adaf (a.k.a. Revelationator) — Sunburnt Faces (An Interview: the World SF Tour) 116. Season of the Witch — A Torture Cinema “Adventure” #13 — Babylon 5 Re-Watch (Ep. 5-8) — A Shoot the WISB Discussion 183. Douglas Lain (a.k.a. Le Révolutionnaire) — Billy Moon (An Interview) #10 — Babylon 5 Re-Watch (Ep. 1-4) — A Shoot the WISB Discussion And here are the top 10 posts (note:  I’ve removed giveaways and polls from the list): My Superpower and Mini-Interview: James Dashner Recommended Reads: 2013 Post-Holiday Reading List The Masks the Monsters Left Behind by Romeo Kennedy (Guest Post) My Superpower: J. M. McDermott The World SF Tour: A Comics and Graphic Novel Reading List? by Shaun Duke Book Review: A DARKLING SEA by James Cambias (by Paul Weimer) The Disquieting Guest — Some Notes on Gore by David Annandale Guest Post: “Tackling Other Cultures in Fiction” by Stina Leicht Series Review: The Split Worlds by Emma Newman (by Paul Weimer) Mining the Genre Asteroid: Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague De Camp (by Paul Weimer) If you missed any of this lovely stuff, catch up now!

Announcements and Errata

Myke Cole at the Library of Congress on January 31st!

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In our upcoming interview with Myke Cole, he mentioned that he will be giving a talk at the Pickford Theater at the Library Congress on Friday (Jan. 31st, 2014).  Since the episode won’t be up in time for people to hear about this event, we wanted to make sure to mention it on the blog. The event takes place at noon in the Pickford Theater (LM-302, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave SE, Washington, DC 20559).  Full details can be found on this File 770 post. We hope some of you can make it!

Blog Posts

A Darkling Sea has a tie-in blog!

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Last week, Paul Weimer reviewed A Darkling Sea by James Cambias. It turns out the good folks at Tor have more to offer than just the book: We at Tor have done something a little extra for A Darkling Sea and created tie-in websites for readers to engage with. IlmatarMission.com is a prop website for the “United Nations Interstellar Cooperation Agency” which features in Cambias’s novel. The website includes information on the space mission, aliens, and characters of A Darkling Sea as well as a link to the personal blog of one of the characters. We believe this will be an exciting opportunity for fans to learn more about the universe Cambias created. Starting on January 28th we will begin posting a series of “log entries” from both the station and one of the characters. January 28th? That’s today! Click on the link above or the banner below to go check out the Ilmatar Mission website!

Giveaways

Dashner Giveaway Winner!

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And the winner is… Tristan! His favorite YA SF/F book, as it turns out, is The Maze Runner by James Dashner.  Go figure, right?  😛 Congrats to Tristan!  And thanks to everyone who entered the contest.

Blog Posts

The Disquieting Guest — Some Notes on Gore

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A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a brief Twitter conversation with Teresa Frohock and Fred Kiesche that touched on the virtues of the suggested versus the explicit in the creation of terror. If memory serves (and my apologies if it does not), Robert Wise’s The Haunting (the 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House) was invoked. That film is, without a doubt, a powerful argument for the virtues of subtlety. So is the CGI-laden 1999 version, which proves just how good Wise’s approach (faithful to Jackson) was by doing the precise opposite and failing in spectacular (if entertaining) fashion. That being said, I would like to mount a bit of a defence of explicitness here. More particularly, I would like to say a few words about the value of gore. Back around the end of the 80s, and the start of the 90s, there was a sometimes-heated debate on this subject. We had “quiet” versus “loud” horror, and this was when the term “splatterpunk” had its greatest currency. While the debates were interesting, the

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