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My Superpower: Tansy Rayner Roberts

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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 Tansy Rayner Roberts.   My superpower is making extra work for my publisher. When your publisher is one of your best friends, and you’re invested in her success almost as much as your own career, it’s a very different relationship than when they are a distant, shiny corporation in a big city somewhere in the world. I’ve had quite a few publishers over the last 19 years as a professional author, and I am very attached to many of them, but Twelfth Planet Press feels like my baby almost as much as it belongs to its publisher, Alisa Krasnostein. I’ve been there from the beginning; watched her projects and aesthetic evolve. I was there as the idea for ‘hey what about monthly collections by female authors’ developed into a massive, sprawling 4 year project.

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Retro Childhood Review: The Book of Three

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“You fool!” he shouted. “You addlepated . . . What have you done? Now both of us are trapped! And you talk about sense! You haven’t . . .” Eilonwy smiled at him and waited until he ran out of breath. “Now,” she said, “if you’ve quite finished, let me explain something very simple to you. If there’s a tunnel, it has to go someplace. And wherever it goes, there’s a very good chance it will be better than where we are now.” In 1985, Disney released the film that would nearly signal its death knell, a movie which basically led to the creation of Don Bluth Productions (thank goodness), a movie which only made half as much as it cost and was altogether a disaster, but it was also a movie that sparked my imagination enough to find the source. That movie was The Black Cauldron. Tricked you. The Black Cauldron is book two of Lloyd Alexander’s epic children’s fantasy series, The Chronicles of Prydain. The Book of Three is the start of that journey.

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Guest Post: Writing the Monster by Scott Oden

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When Thomas Hobbes called the life of a man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, he could easily have been referring to the life of an Orc. Since their humble beginnings as song-croaking goblins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, these dim-witted, often Cockney-speaking brutes have grown well beyond the Professor’s intent; they have seized a place of their own in the annals of Fantasy. While some fans will never see them as anything other than sword fodder and servants of this Dark Lord or that, others have embraced them as noble savages, maligned and misunderstood – and worthy of their own books. Long have I pondered the question of how mere spear-carriers in the epic drama of Tolkien’s legendarium captured the imaginations of so many readers. 

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Book Review: A Man from Planet Earth by Giancarlo Genta

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Starting in 2014 Springer began publishing books in their Science and Fiction series, a collection “born out of the recognition that scientific discovery and the creation of plausible fictional scenarios are often two sides of the same coin.” Envisioned as “hard” science fiction that is largely written by practicing scientists, the series includes novels, collections of short stories, critical analysis, and covering topics in a relatively non-technical matter, as they could be applied in genre speculation. I’m not one to leap at the chance to read works that promote themselves as hard science fiction. In general I find they are too conservative in their political and social outlook and too focused on technology or engineering rather than science. The science that is present seems dominated by physics and astronomy, and any literary aspects become utterly expendable. Obviously this isn’t always true, and even if not often literary, a hard science fiction story like one in Analog can be entertaining while teaching the reader about something new. As a scientist myself I was excited when I heard about this series from Springer, I think more scientists should develop skills at bridging the science and the fiction universes. I hoped (and still do) that their curated series would tilt towards the type of technically focused science fiction that I could still find entertaining.

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Guest Post: Growing up in Fandom in the 1970s, by LJ Cohen

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I’m not sure if this still holds true today, but if you came of age in the 1970s, were a strong early reader who had read through all the books specifically written for children, and you were lucky enough to have a sympathetic librarian, you’d be directed to the science fiction and fantasy shelves. At least that’s my story. The Heinlein juveniles had been published a decade before I was born, but they were the first genre books I read. From there, I found all the Lensman books — written even earlier! I may have only been 10 or 11 when I read these, but even then I was frustrated by the insistence that only one special, fierce woman — to be born in some far future — could be a Lensman. Lenses were objects of power that amplified the qualities within a person. The message I got was that girls, as a rule, didn’t deserve power and couldn’t wield power. That I didn’t deserve power; that I was wasn’t good enough. It angered me that girls weren’t the ones leaping up to explore the stars. Asimov’s Robot books fascinated me, but the only woman portrayed in them — Susan Calvin — was more robotic than the robots.

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Top 10 Posts and Episodes for May 2017

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Time for another statistics post! Here’s what readers and listeners loved on our blog or podcast throughout May 2017: Top Posts: A Book by its Cover: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi (written by Shaun Duke) Metropolis (1927), Feminism, and Influence by Stina Leicht The 2017 Charity Fundraiser for Human Rights Watch: Make Us Review Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) for a Good Cause! (PLEASE DONATE!) Book Review: CUCKOO SONG by Frances Hardinge (written by Daniel Haeusser) Breaking News: Peter Jackson to turn The Silmarillion into a 14-movie epic by Mike Martinez Book Review: All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (written by Paul Weimer) Switching Between Lanes by Stephanie Burgis Ten Post-Apocalyptic Novels Written by Women by Nicolette Stewart Book Review: The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley (written by Paul Weimer) Book Review: Children of the Different by S.C. Flynn (written by Daniel Haeusser) Top Episodes: 324. Inclusivity in Fairy Tales — A Discussion w/ Sara Cleto, Brittany Warman, and Shveta Thakrar #55. Attack the Block (2011) — A Shoot the WISB Subcast w/ Tiara W. Signal Boost #6: Sophia Chester (Cosmic Callisto Caprica/Rocket Romance) and Heather Rose Jones (Alpennia Series/Lesbian Historic Motif Project) 313. Looking Back, Moving Forward: Anticipating 2017 Signal Boost #3: A Conversation about Marvel’s Nazi Problem Signal Boost #4: Gideon Marcus (GalacticJourney.org) and Andrew Barton (Tailings of the Golden Age) 323. Betsy Dornbusch (a.k.a. The God Sword) — Enemy (An Interview) Signal Boost #5: A Conversation about CoGeeko Ergo Sum 322. Babylon A.D. (2008) — A Torture Cinema “Adventure” w/ DongWon Song #58. Night Watch (2004) w/ Juan Sanmiguel — A Shoot the WISB Subcast What did you enjoy the most? Let us know in the comments!

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