226. Anne Lyle (a.k.a. Skraelabite) — The Night’s Masque Trilogy (An Interview at CONvergence)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode226InterviewWAnneLyle/SandF%20–%20Episode%20226%20–%20Interview%20w%20Anne%20Lyle.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSSwords, weird London, and humanoid critters, oh my! Anne Lyle, author of the Night’s Masque trilogy from Angry Robot Books, joined Paul and Shaun at CONvergence to talk about her work. A few laughs were shared! We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 225 — Download (MP3) Show Notes: Anne’s Website Anne’s Books Anne’s Twitter Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks! Thanks for listening. See you next week.
My Superpower: David Colby
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 David Colby to talk about how the power of Realism relates to Debris Dreams. —————————————————– So, I once tried to read Game of Thrones, and I got fifty pages in before I threw my Kindle across the room. The first thing that came to mind was: Oh god, that was a hundred bucks and my Mom’s, I’m so screwed. The second thing that came to mind was: Man! Everyone in that book was a gigantic A-hole. But it is realistic. Feudalism, by and large, was a social system that did little more than create self-entitled jerks by separating the ruling class from the ruled and telling them from birth that they were chosen by God to run everything forever, which (as we can see from today’s spate of “affluenza” news stories) is a great way raise sociopaths like Joffrey.
Book Review: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 edited by Rich Horton
My diverse reading (which extends well beyond SF/F) makes it unfeasible for me to catch everything of interest or of merit. I, thus, appreciate the multiple anthologies each year that offer their unique selections of noteworthy short stories. This marks the sixth year of Horton’s relatively young Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy series, but it happens to be the first one that I’ve read. It will be hard to fit in past years to catch up, but I’m going to strive to make it part of the future annual reading queue. The extensive breadth and diversity of this collection strikes me foremost. The sources for the stories include a balance of major print and online magazines to smaller outlets and stand-alone publications, and the stories themselves extend through the many forms and combinations of science fiction and fantasy. A part of me wishes that literary outlets were also included in this mix, as genre elements are increasingly found within their pages. Yet another part of me recognizes that the literary world often ignores the genre, so the reverse is just as appropriate.
My Superpower: J. Giambrone
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 J. Giambrone to talk about how the power of Seeing Metaphors relates to Transfixion. ——————————– In the 1999 M. Night Shyamalan film, The Sixth Sense, a boy is blessed, or cursed as it were, with the ability to see ghosts. “I see dead people” was his memorable catch phrase. Well, I see metaphors. All around us. Lingering in the background like vermin crawling in the shadows. So I’d better write about them, before someone else does. A “superpower?” Shhh. Let’s just leave it as a gift — a gift that keeps on giving.
“Where Are the Wise Crones in Science Fiction?” by Athena Andreadis (Reprint)
[This essay first appeared at the Astrogator’s Logs of Starship Reckless.] “The childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually very young in years.” — Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Until recently, women died on the average younger than men, primarily in childbirth – though they also died from overwork, undernourishment and beatings, like the beasts of burden they often resembled, or were killed in infancy for having the wrong hardware between their legs. However, this changed in the last few decades. UN records indicate that most of the world’s aged are now women (ignoring the “girl gap” of China, India and other cultures that deem sons a sine qua non). Concurrently, biology is (reluctantly) coming to the conclusion that grandmothers, particularly maternal ones, may have made humans who they are.
Book Review: Upgraded edited by Neil Clarke
As a rule, I loathe anthologies in which the stories are united by a narrow subgenre. A general editorial direction is something I appreciate, but I have had several experiences in which I was lured in only to throw the book across the room after two or three stories. “Self, what the hell were you thinking? Did you really want to read twenty some-odd stories in a row about the Lovecraftian mythos/sapient aliens/marketing gimmick du jour?” It is therefore a great testament to the quality of the stories in Upgraded, a 2014 anthology edited by Neil Clarke, that I actually finished it.
