Okay, the princess rescued herself. Now What?!
Welcome to my new comics review feature here at Skiffy & Fanty. Every month, I’m going to use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (including print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. Because Saga and Squirrel Girl are freaking amazing, but there’s so much more out there to love! This month, I’m kicking things off by asking you to turn your attention to the graphic novel Another Castle: Grimoire. (This review contains spoilers.)
Around the Podosphere #13: Podcasts of Note for June 24
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted one of these. Since the Skiffy and Fanty crew collectively listen to more podcasts than there are episodes of our show (totally scientific, promise), it’s about time we brought the Around the Podosphere back to share some of the goodness worming its way into our ears. So, here goes:
My Superpower: Tansy Rayner Roberts
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.
Retro Childhood Review: The Book of Three
“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.
Guest Post: Writing the Monster by Scott Oden
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.
Book Review: A Man from Planet Earth by Giancarlo Genta
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.
