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Mining the Genre Asteroid: War for the Oaks by Emma Bull

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Eddi McCandry is the guitarist for a band that has just broken up. Her career in rock’n’roll is going nowhere; she’s broken up with her boyfriend; and she is more than a little adrift. Luckily for Eddi, a twist of fate makes her the one selected as the talisman for the conflict between two warring factions of faerie:  Seelie and Unseelie. They need a mortal present in order to be able to actually war against each other and physically battle, and Eddi has gotten the job. Add in a Phouka keeper to shepherd her through the runup to the Faerie confrontation, Eddi’s attempts to form a new band and find herself and her musical voice, and a gigantic helping of late 1980’s Minneapolis. And did I mention the Unseelie are trying to kill her?

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Metropolis (1927), Feminism, and Influence

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Since there seems to be so much noise these days about the Golden Age of SF, I decided to begin rewatching (or in some cases, watching) classic genre films in order to get a more sound foundation in my chosen genre. If I do this with novels, why not films? In this case, I’m glad that I did. One of my graphic design professors had us watch Metropolis in class. I’d vaguely remembered it as stylish — it’s a fine example of Art Deco design — and only a little coherent. At the time, I wondered why anyone would sit through the whole thing. It made no sense. The professor didn’t mention that the film had been censored. I’m not sure she was aware of how much it’d gotten cut as she didn’t mention it in the introduction. When I looked for it on Netflix, I found two versions. The first claimed to have restored footage and an 80s soundtrack. The second also had restored footage. What I failed to notice was that the first print was one hour and fifteen minutes long. The second? Two hours and fifteen minutes. I recall the version I saw in class was less than an hour. Wow.

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The Disquieting Guest — Calvaire and the Tyrannies of Desire

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There is no denying that extreme horror, at its worst, fulfils pretty much every outside observer’s worst surmises about quote-unquote torture porn. But at its best, it has a merciless rigour that pushes viewers into places they may not wish to go but are important for them to confront. Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire (2004) is a case in point. Calvaire is a Belgian film and not, strictly speaking, part of the New French Extreme trend in horror films (Inside, High Tension, Martyrs, etc.). But if we reconsider the term slightly as the New French-Language Extreme, then it fits in very nicely with its dark cousins (and Martyrs, a France-Canada co-production, becomes a better fit as well). While not as gory as some, its unblinking willingness to explore the heart of darkness marks it, for me, as part of that loosely defined movement.*

Announcements and Errata

Review Doors Open: Authors/Publishers/Creators — Bring It On!

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If you didn’t hear the cool news, we’ve added four lovely people to our blogging crew:  Trish Matson, Cecily Kane, Daniel Haeusser, and Ciaran Roberts.  They’ll primarily review books, comics, and other things here, and they’ll help us fill the gap that poor Paul has been unable to fill on his own!  You can learn more about each of them on our contributors page. That means we’re opening our doors to more reviews, which is a fairly new thing for us.  Full guidelines are listed here, but you might also be interested to know that our reviewers are happy to cover a wide variety of formats, including: Novels and novellas Anthologies and collections (we have one dedicated reviewer to this category) Comics Movies UK authors will also be happy to know that one of our reviewers is located across the pond.  If you have a book releasing in the UK, do get in touch! International Authors:  our 2014 theme is “the World SF Tour.”  If you’re a non-U.S./U.K. author, don’t hesitate to contact us, whether for a review or to participate in a podcast episode. If you’d like to have your work reviewed, send a description of the book(s) (press release or pitch) to at skiffyandfanty[at]gmail[dot]com.  Additionally, it is helpful for our reviewers if you provide a link to the publisher’s site for the book and to an excerpt (if available).  Intended release date is also useful for determining the urgency for a review. As the title says:  bring it on!

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Urban Fantasy in World SF: Scale-Bright by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

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Demons stalking the streets, hidden from ordinary view and prying eyes, living their lives as ordinary people. A pair of goddesses in a long term, loving, and sometimes fraught relationship. A (relatively) ordinary mortal, swept up in events by a chance meeting with one of the aforementioned demons, drawing her deeper into a magical portion of the world. This sounds like the latest urban fantasy, doesn’t it? The city is probably New York City, maybe London, right? The Goddesses are probably Greco-Roman, maybe Norse? The demon is probably of Judeo-Christian origin? Bog standard Urban Fantasy, right? No, no, no, and no. The Goddesses are Chinese, and one of them is a gender-flipped version of a God from Chinese Mythology. And yes, they are married (and oh the scandal in Heaven!). Similarly, the demons are from that same tradition, and the city is Hong Kong. This is urban fantasy, if one will call it that, of a different sort. This is Scale-Bright, by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

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Book Review: Phantasm Japan edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington

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Occasionally, I read something and don’t particularly want to review it so much as say, just read this. Or produce a review consisting of nothing but quotations from the text:  let the evidence speak. Phantasm Japan, a 2014 anthology edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington, is such a book. Pardon me while I spend the next several hundred words embarrassingly fangirl-gushing about it. There are a few different ways to measure an anthology’s success. The one that is used most often is determining how many of the stories the reader liked versus how many they didn’t. While there’s nothing wrong with this as a metric, it’s not the primary one I use. My favorite anthologies shift my perception in some fundamental way, whether by some of the stories taken individually or by the aggregate body. Phantasm Japan does both. Considerably. Of course, producing a collection that’s bold and smart is not without risk; two or three of the more cerebral stories in this anthology sailed right over my head. There were several more that blew my mind in the best possible way.

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