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My Superpower: Mur Lafferty

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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 Mur Lafferty to talk about how the power of giving nicknames relates (not quite) to The Ghost Train to New Orleans. ——————————————— My super power is dormant; I haven’t used it for years. Like most powers, I didn’t realize I had it until the power had gotten out of control. I have the power to give people nicknames that stick. I started with myself — totally unintentionally. My name wasn’t Mur when I went to college; it was just a pet name my parents called me. But there was another woman named Mary in our suite of eight, so I decided since very few people knew me, I could start introducing myself as Mur. It worked. Now only my aunts, bankers, and doctors call me Mary. Everyone else calls me Mur.

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Book Review: Debris by Jo Anderton

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Tanyana is an architect, and a pretty good one, if you’d ask her. Actually, Pride is indeed her nearly mortal sin. While her control of pions, the magical particles at the base of all of the technomagic of the city of Movac-under-Kepper is indeed strong and clever, it is not perfect. An incident in the construction of a great and mighty statue leaves Tanyana cut off from being able to see and access pions. Worse, from her perspective, her abilities have been replaced with the underclass ability to see and manipulate debris, the waste product, the garbage created by pion technology. This debris can be actively dangerous to society, and those capable of manipulating it are tasked with cleaning it up and keeping it from harming the city. And so, the proud and mighty architect has become something she never expected and never wanted–a lowly garbage collector.

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My Superpower: Jonathan Wood

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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 Jonathan Wood to talk about how the power of Multitasking and Toothpaste relates to No Hero. —————————————— When asked to write about my super power, I panicked. I am British and middle class. There’s my ability to consume staggering amounts of bland, flavorless food, but that doesn’t seem like exactly the right subject matter. So I did what I usually do when I am at a loss. I turned to my wife. She shrugged (which, in retrospect, was not the most encouraging sign) and said, “You could write about your multi-tasking thing.”

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Mining the Genre Asteroid: The Saga of Pliocene Exile by Julian May

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22nd Century Earth is a pretty nice place. Earth is becoming more and more integrated into the Galactic Milieu, with alien trade and technology rapidly fixing the problems of Earth and making life better for everyone. Mental powers, for so long disbelieved, distrusted and unreliable, have proven to be a Thing, and it is in fact Man’s discovery of these metapsychic powers that caused First Contact to happen in the first place back in 2013. Yet, even in a Earth heading toward utopia, there are going to be people who are dissatisfied. There are people not so happy with the idea of alien cultures influencing and affecting Earth. There are those who seek a “final frontier”, one even more exotic than colonizing nearby star systems. There are those who seek to disrupt this happy society.

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Book Review: Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

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This semester, I’m teaching a course on American literature which seeks to challenge what that term actually means and how we can define “American Lit” as something which is multi-national, multi-cultural, and infinitely larger.  After all, we live in the Americas; technically speaking, Canadians are Americans in this sense of the term.  That’s why I’m here talking about Surfacing by Margaret Atwood and not As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Though only loosely fantastic, Atwoods Surfacing is a complex, character-driven feminist tale about relationships, patriarchy, nationalism, and the human psyche.  It follows an unnamed narrator who returns with her friends to her childhood home to search for her missing father, who she assumes has either died or run off into the woods.  As she tries to piece together her father’s last days from the clues left in his cabin, she is confronted with her friends’ abusive marriage, her recent and distant past, and the crippling expectations of post-WW2 society (and the changes brought on by the Quiet Revolution in 1960s Quebec).  Though not intended as horror, Surfacing explores its themes with a sense of impending terror, such that the final moments, which I won’t discuss in any detail here, are profoundly fantastic, with the character drama forming the root of an exploding, terror-driven tree.

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Boo! Horror in Southeast Asia!

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When I was growing up, I heard stories about the flying heads-with-entrails that would lurk in the dark. People would grow cacti or thorny plants in their gardens to deter such horrific creatures. So there I was, listening to my relatives breathlessly account their experiences (or friend of a friend’s, you know, the usual) of finding one of those flying heads stuck in the cacti, their entrails caught and snared. Then, there were the stories when I grew up and started working. How my friend’s father confronted a pontianak out right. They had heard her shrieks in the darkness. Frightened, they huddled, but the father simply stalked out and challenged the Pontianak: “I know you are here! Show yourself!” A pontianak is a spirit of a woman who has died in childbirth and undead; she stalks for blood, especially the blood of a newborn and its mother.

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