“The Mysterious Appeal of Tintin” by Jonathan Wood
Hey guys, I’ve got this great idea. I’m going to write detective stories about a Belgian man-child and his alcoholic best friend. For kids! Clearly that shouldn’t work. It’s madness. Except Hergé started drawing his Tintin cartoons in the 1930s, and in 2011 the series was still popular enough for Steven Spielberg to turn it into a blockbuster movie. Hell, I’ve loved Tintin since I discovered him about twenty-five years ago. Clearly, there is some curious Belgian alchemy at work here. But what the hell is it?
My Superpower: Corie Weaver
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 Corie Weaver to talk about how the power of Overcomplication relates to The Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide (Kickstarter). ——————————– If you asked my husband, he’d say my superpower is overcomplicating things. The other night, we grilled out, and at the last minute, I decided I didn’t want ketchup. I could *taste* what I wanted. Tomato paste, a tiny bit of red wine, chili powder. I was right – it was delicious, but it did create an unexpected bump in the dinner plans. And that may be how, when I had planned to spend the summer putting the final touches on a new YA space opera, we’re instead editing an anthology of science fiction stories for middle grade readers. Like a lot of the sudden complications in our life, it started from a few diverse ingredients.
My Superpower: Benjanun Sriduangkaew
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 Benjanun Sriduangkaew to talk about how the power of War relates to Scale Bright. ———————————————– My superpower is an intense interest in war. Strictly on the page, I hasten to add. Recently, I pitched a story idea like so: ‘Deep Ones meet Little Mermaid, told as military fantasy’. I think the editor liked it(?) and seemed pleased that it wasn’t quite like anything else pitched so far. A good thing, yay! On the other hand, I discovered that I might have a problem; usually, one thinks Little Mermaid and the idea of red-haired Ariel tends to come up first thing — not so much, ah, military fantasy. If by remote chance you have read my short stories, you will find war present in many of them, and there is probably a reason most of my SF tends to be read as military.
A World SF Reading List
I’ve been collecting recommendations from Twitter using the #worldsfbooks hashtag for this list. Since this year’s theme is all about World SF, it makes sense that we’d celebrate that with a massive list of stuff you should read. If you’d like to add anything to the list, leave a comment on this page OR use the #worldsfbooks hashtag on Twitter! So, without further ado, here’s the list (below the fold):
My Superpower: Kameron Hurley
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 Kameron Hurley to talk about how the power of preternatural calm relates to The Mirror Empire. —————————————– My mom and I share a similar superpower – the ability to stay preternaturally calm during times of great stress and turmoil. Grievous injury, car accidents, difficult births… if something horrible happens, we’ll calmly bind wounds, give the injured a soothing pep talk, call 911 and do the shit that needs to get done, with no shaking or screaming or crying or fuss. This response to times of great stress has made nearly every movie where folks scream and seize up and flail in the face of terror difficult for me to watch; I never find it terribly believable. Yes, of course, you startle for a minute, but then you center yourself, you go cold, right? You move through it. Breakdown later, when you have the time. In truth, this calm in the face of extreme stress has gotten me called all sorts of names over the years: unfeeling, inhuman, monstrous. What many folks don’t understand about this stress response is that it’s not that I don’t feel things – it’s that I simply delay feeling them. When the stressor has passed and everyone is cared for and there is nothing more to do, I crash. I’ve used this response to trauma a few times in building characters in my novels, too, most notably in the character of Lilia, the protagonist of my novel The Mirror Empire, whose ability to push through horror makes her one of the few people in her country who can adjust to the coming war of attrition thrust upon her pacifist people.
Tobias Buckell on the (New) Art of The Xenowealth Saga
In 2006, I came out with my first novel in the US, a somewhat hard-to-categorize (I’m told, I think it makes perfect sense, I wrote it after all) science fiction novel with Caribbean peoples settled on an alien world that have long since lost touch with their home world. That was Crystal Rain. I alternated between calling it Caribbean steampunk (a few years early, I think, for steampunk) and Caribbean SF. It had a cover I adored — created by the amazing Todd Lockwood, a well known fantasy artist who’s work is amazing. I have a print of the art framed on my wall: an airship above a verdant forest being chased by another distant ship. But when the novel came out, booksellers emailed me to say that the cover looked like the book was a fantasy, creating confusion among casual browsers. Core SF readers didn’t want to pick up the book. Fantasy readers put it down when they realized what it was.
