Question of the Week

Question of the Week

Question of the Week: What is your favorite forgotten or unknown fantasy series?

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Since we just talked about fantasy in our latest episode of the show, we think it would be fun to see what you all consider to be your favorite forgotten or relatively unknown fantasy series.  Let us know in the comments!  It doesn’t matter how obscure it is, because either way, we really want to know. But first, here are out favorites: Shaun My mother actually introduced me to one of my favorite series of fantasy novels, which also happens to be a series that very few people have heard of or read:  the Duncton Wood series by William Horwood.  The books focus on the lives of a complex society of moles, including their mythologies and interactions with other mole communities.  They are epic in scale, brilliantly characterized, and simply some of the best books I have ever read.  They’re also not typical animal fantasy novels.  The moles don’t carry swords and do ninja flips like they do in the Redwall novels or The Chronicles of Narnia.  Horwood takes the characters seriously as animals, and then develops a culture out of that framework.  I’d definitely recommend them to anyone who likes fantasy. Jen Damnit, Shaun!  You didn’t tell me the question was going to be a doozy when you texted me that the question was up and ready for me to answer! Forgotten or Unknown?!  I figure you have to have buried your head under a rock to have missed most of the series I have read.  Regardless, I think… errgh.  It has to be a toss-up between Barry Hughart’s Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and any series by Sean Russell (but particularly his Initate Brother duology).  I actually somewhat credit the Initiate Brother with my stationery obsession.  Hughart’s and Wrede’s series turn fairy tales on their heads in such brilliant (but entirely different) fashions that you can’t help but be impressed and the Initiate Brother books are epic in scope and blast all of that stupid Leo Grin’s arguments out of the water.  It isn’t often that you find an entire series that you can read over and over again (just wait until we have to answer this question about scifi, because I totally have my answer), but I’ve done that with all of the aforementioned titles.  Go find them.  Read them.  You’ll thank me later. There you go!  So, what’s your favorite forgotten or unknown fantasy series?

Question of the Week

Question of the Week: Who would win — trolls or singing frogs?

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It’s about time we ask a silly question, and what’s more silly than deciding the victor in a fight between trolls and singing frogs? Here are our answers: Shaun Trolls are dumb.  Really dumb.  Singing frogs, on the other hand, are adept manipulators.  See here for evidence: See?  If you honestly think a troll (or even trolls) can outsmart a singing frog, then you are totally looney tunes. Jen Singing Frogs. Obviously. Here’s my rationale: In the grand scheme of things, the trolls could probably eat all the frogs and there you have it, but realistically speaking, the frogs probably out breed the trolls. So, really, all the frogs have to do is keep squirting out tadpoles and let the trolls kill themselves off (by getting tricked into staying out in the sun by gray wizards). Anyway, you know trolls totally have a weakness for singing (because I say they do) and the frogs could probably just sing them into a mesmeric daze until the sun comes up – gray wizards not necessary! Either way, the singing frogs win! Now we want your opinion!  Who do you think would win:  trolls or singing frogs?  Let us know in the comments!

Question of the Week

Question of the Week: What was your best conference/convention experience?

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There’s a good reason for this question:  if you haven’t already noticed, we’ve been hanging out at the Eaton Conference in Riverside, California; if you have noticed, then I’m not contributing anything interesting and will move on. The entire conference was absolutely amazing and we thought it would be a great idea to see what other kinds of experiences folks have had at conferences or conventions.  Thanks to John Ottinger and Patrick Hester for their responses! Now for the answers: Shaun There are so many to list.  Really.  I’ve walked through an anime convention with cat ears and a tail, my brother alongside me in the same garb.  I’ve run RPG campaigns at conventions which turned out to be slightly insane and a whole lot of violence and fun (you should ask my brother about the time he played Rifts with us and kept getting knocked out every two seconds).  Heck, I’ve even met the guy who created Evangelion and watched Star Wars fan films in scary back rooms! But I have to say that, thus far, my experiences at the Eaton Conference have been the best.  Not only did I get to meet a great deal of people I greatly respect, whether as scholars (John Rieder, Carl Freedman, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., De Witt Douglas Kilgore, and others) or authors (China Mieville, Greg Benford, Karen Tei Yamashita, etc.), and hang out with one of my bestest best friends of best-ness, but I also got to meet the person I was actually presenting on:  Nalo Hopkinson. My first encounter with her involved me essentially embarrassing myself:  I quite literally went up to her, stopped for several seconds, and blurted out “Hi, you talk to me on Twitter.”  I got the impression that she deals with such things quite often, as she took it in stride as Jen rescued me from my bumbling self.  More normal encounters followed (to be honest, by the time the conference was over, I had mostly normalized, which is kind of a little late to get over your fanboy nonsense) and I had a lovely conversation with her after my presentation about her work, general nice things, and other writers.  It was awesome!  Similar things happened with other authors, such as China Mieville, who also had to deal with my fanboy nonsense until early Sunday, in which I was apparently coherent enough to hold a conversation.  The only exception was Karen Yamashita, who actually teaches at my alma mater (UC Santa Cruz); for some reason we had quite a lot to talk about already, since we had both experienced the amusing antics of one of my previous professors. Overall, though, I think the experience was a good one, because I haven’t been in a single space with so many people who I have read, loved, and so on.  Needless to say, the experience was pretty much all kinds of awesome. Unfortunately, the second person I was talking about in my paper wasn’t there (where were you, Tobias S. Buckell?), but since I basically stalk him on Twitter anyway, I can at least pretend he was there in spirit.  That said, one day I will have my bumbling fanboy moment with you, Mr. Buckell.  One day… Jen I realize we’re coming off of a very exciting weekend at a conference, but my best conference/convention memory is actually from my childhood. My father started attending a gaming convention called “Conquest” when I was fairly young.  He went for the dungeons and dragons and when I got a bit older he started running gaming sessions for my friends and I.  Those were some very formative experiences  for me and I remember them very fondly.  Anyway, eventually my parents started taking  a whole crew of us up to the convention and let us run wild.  I think we were the only kids in these early years, as my father was one of those early adopters of role-playing games and, likewise, an early attender of gaming conventions.  Anyway, the most memorable moment for me is actually running through those halls (it was at a hotel up near San Francisco that looked vaguely castle-like) and generally creating havoc – creating our own live d&d adventures.  The specific moment though was probably when we decided it would be fun to stop the elevator between floors and open the doors.  I have no idea what I read on the wall, at that moment, but I do remember knowing, with absolute certainty, that it was written by a geek and that they had written it for US. Second most memorable experience was driving around with a dear friend of mine during a Dundracon and imagining that all the corporate buildings that surrounded the hotel were straight out of Stephenson’s Diamond Age.  I miss you, Anicka. I’ve had a number of cool con moments since then, but they’ve all been very personal moments that didn’t necessarily require a con for them to have occurred.  The things that make Cons special though are those moments that do require the convention to bring together a geographically disparate group that are all so strongly tied together by whatever that con happens to be about.  That meeting of minds is truly Epic. Patrick Hester Hmmm… Well, there’s favorite and then there’s memorable. Memorable first. I grew up in Fresno, California. Fresno… There’s not a lot to do in Fresno when you’re growing up. I spent a lot of time in the comic book store or at the Fresno State Student Union (where all the kids hung out…) shooting pool or bowling ($3/hr all you can play…). Anyway, I saw a flier that Creation was coming to town to do a Star Trek convention. This was when The Next Generation was hot. I really wanted to go so I talked a friend of mine (who had a car, which I did not) to drive me (it was further out in the country than I could go on my mountain bike, which was

Question of the Week

Question of the Week: Why do you think libraries are important?

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Our first edition of the new “Question of the Week” feature is a tad sentimental.  That’s because we’re dropping our hearts right into one of the sad developments of the recession era:  namely, library closures in the U.S. and the U.K.  Philip Pullman has already given his spirited response; we’re going to throw in our two cents and we have asked some others to toss in their thoughts too.  And then we want to know what you think. First, the responses: Shaun I’ve already written about this on my personal blog, but with a semi-political slant.  There are plenty of perfectly good reasons for having libraries, some of them in the form that I discussed on my blog, and others in the form of things others have already brought up (i.e., Philip Pullman and other celebrities refer to having wonderful experiences in libraries, usually ones that changed their lives).  The fact of the matter is that libraries are an immense resource not just for people in general, but more specifically for parents.  We know from studies (some of which we’ve discussed in the podcast) that children who grow up in households with little to no books suffer long term educational consequences for that absence, which often rolls over into succeeding generations.  Illiteracy is a social disease; libraries are the vaccine.  If I’m correct in assuming that library closures are a socio-economic problem, then it would be fair to assume that closing libraries in small towns will disproportionately affect the people, poor or otherwise, in those towns, since it will remove access to literacy resources in the form of reading programs and actual reading materials.  Hell, even computer access is a literacy resource.  For that reason, I think libraries are not just important, but absolutely essential to the well-being of people, regardless of their national or economic origins.  Reading is a wonderful gift.  Being able to read even more so.  Libraries offer that gift for a fraction of your tax dollars, and then cultivate it like a literacy seed.  People, of course, have different experiences with libraries; some may be changed forever, while others might not use the library at all.  But the library should always be there for them if they need it, like a lighthouse at the edge of a rocky sea.  We need a few static things in the world… Jen This is what I get for not responding until after Shaun responds, which means that he’s pretty much already said everything that I want to say and more eloquently.  Luckily, I have a slightly different perspective on the situation because I have kids.  I’ve touched on this in the podcast before, but nobody listens anyway so I’ll risk repeating myself and boring everyone.  In the town we used to live in, the library was like a second home to myself (as it has always been for me) and my children.  We spent, on average, only one day a week there, but that was the most special day of the week because it meant new reading material for my very voracious daughters and it also meant chess club!  The library is not just a source of books, it is a source of community camaraderie.  The girls made friends there, they could relax there, they could learn there.    Our new home is in a much smaller town with only one library for the entire county.  It’s almost a tragedy how few resources it gets and how much the community depends on it.   Not only do they provide books, but they provide after-school tutoring, language classes, computer classes, employment help, etc. etc.  Those resources were even further strained recently when the school board decided to cut funding for school libraries, forcing even more pressure onto the county library.  Is the school system planning on helping out the county library monetarily?  Of course not… AND my governor has decided that the entire state budget for libraries should be cut.  Unfortunately, I live in a county that barely has the local tax base to support the library on it’s own.  Our library will buckle under the pressure.  It will only be through the dedicated service of local volunteers that it might survive, but the majority of the services will be gone and the community will suffer.  Shaun is absolutely correct – small towns are the most in danger of losing their libraries and they are the most in need of them.  So please donate to your local libraries.  One of the easiest ways to help is by donating the books you just bought and read and definitely don’t need sitting on your bookshelf at home – share it with your community!  Or deliberately turn your book in late so you accrue fines and HAVE to “donate” money 😉 T. M. Hunter (author of the Aston West stories and novels) Most of all, I’d say there are no other alternatives out there providing books for free (short of pirating electronic copies, which is illegal). Certainly, there are cheaper alternatives than buying hardback copies from your local store, but when one pits disposable income purchases against basic survival needs, books and other reading material will (usually) always go by the wayside. Knowledge is power, as we know, and one should not be left behind the power curve simply for a lack of income. Jason Sanford (via his Twitter) (author of numerous award-winning and nominated short stories) Libraries? Great things, libraries. The best gauge of a person’s potential is a library card in their pocket. There you go. So, why do you think libraries are important? Let us know in the comments or send your answer to our Twitter account (or via email — skiffyandfanty[at]gmail[dot]com).

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