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Mining the Genre Asteroid: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

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“Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come” A portion of that line from Revelations is a code phrase that Colonel Mark Bragg, U.S. Air Force has with his little brother Randolph (Randy Bragg). The scene is 1950’s Florida, the small river town of Fort Repose. A sleepy isolated burg, Mark has sent his wife and children to stay with Randy along with the message. Geopolitical tensions have been rising, from spy satellites to conflict in the Middle East. Events are rapidly moving toward a head. The Missile Gap and technological superiority on the part of the Warsaw Pact means that for the moment, the Soviet Union has an advantage over the United States. This imbalance is a temporary advantage, perhaps one large enough to use. The code phrase’s meaning, then?  Nuclear War is nigh.

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Adventures in Teaching: Trauma and Realism in (Some) Weird Novels

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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

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The Disquieting Guest — Horror in/and Fantasy

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A few weeks back, Shaun quipped to me that horror is “fantasy with scary bits.” Even further back, a discussion went around on Twitter as to whether horror and epic or high fantasy could coexist. A few remarks this week (which I will get to in due course) had me thinking about this issue again. As I’ve argued previously, horror is too polymorphous to be considered a genre — any attempt to define it as such winds up with exclusions and inclusions so remarkable as to invalidate the definition. For example:  an insistence that there must be an element of the supernatural excludes the likes of Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and so on. On the other hand, horror’s symbiotic/parasitic nature allows it

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Worldbuilding: Why It Ain’t So Easy

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So, I appeared at an event at the San Marcos Library on Sunday where I’d been asked to give a talk about research. During the question and answer section, someone asked me why I would go to all the trouble of setting a fantasy in the real world? “Why do that when you can just make stuff up? That’s easier, after all. It’s a short cut!”  Yeah. Um. Not so much. First, writing isn’t easy, nor is making up stuff. Worldbuilding is hard work — very difficult, detailed work. If you’re not thinking about the worldbuilding aspects of your story that much, then what you’re doing is probably derivative, and that’s not good. It’s far easier to work with environments with which the reader is already familiar than it is to make up a foreign world and make it plausible. There are certain cues

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MINING THE GENRE ASTEROID: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

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“What is right for the community is right even unto death for the individual. There is no individual, there is only the community.” In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in isolated Appalachia, a powerful extended family is determined to survive. Crop failure. Climate change. Ecological and environmental collapse. Pandemic, social upheaval and worse. All of this threatens the end of humanity, and indeed of most animal species in the bargain.This community builds itself a safehold to survive the turbulence and save a remnant of humanity in the bargain. When it turns out the pandemics have left everyone in the extended family infertile, the only solution that presents itself to save humanity is to clone the members of the extended family (and their local livestock as well). The clones can carry humanity ahead a generation or three, and then the ordinary course of marriage and mating can resume the community’s usual social structures.  However, once born, the clones have their own

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Geekomancer Under Glass: Beyond the Capes (Part Two)

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Hello! This is S&F’s own Geekomancer, Mike Underwood, back again to talk about more comics outside the supers genre. Today, I’m going to talk about one classic and a couple of more recent up-and-coming comics. Hinterkind One of the new offerings from Vertigo following the departure of long-time executive editor Karen Berger, Hinterkind (Writer: Ian Edginton, Artist: Franceso Trifogli) is pitched as The Inverse Fables.  In this world, Faerie creatures have returned and overthrown humanity, who now live in small enclaves hidden away, like Angus and Prosper’s group, which has ironically holed up in Central Park. When their closest human neighbors in Albany

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