Fantasy Utopias
This old Sady Doyle post at The Awl helps me understand better where I think she’s coming from in regards to Martin’s work. After pointing out the many flaws with female-oriented fantasy, she writes:...
Tagged: fantasy
Alyssa Rosenberg on ‘A Game of Thrones’ and that Sady Doyle piece
Alyssa has the best response up yet to Sady Doyle’s critique of George R. R. Martin. I realize that we’ve done this to death over the past few days, but I do highly recommend...
Can Men Discuss Sexism?
“If a male is intrinsically incapable of contributing valid criticism of a feminist critique, then what is the point of a male trying to understand the critique at all?” ~ Paul Crider, in a...
Sexism in Fantasy
Spoilers for the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire below. A few noted, minor spoilers for the last two. Sady Doyle apparently wants female characters in George R. R. Martin’s...
Elsewhere, Hither and Thither
My second piece is live at The Atlantic. This time around I offer up some reading recommendations for those of us on George R. R. Martin withdrawals. I’m sure that I will learn that...
The wheel of fantasy
Riffing off of my Atlantic piece, fantasy author R. Scott Bakker writes: According to common wisdom, genre fiction is culturally cyclical: It ebbs and flows in popularity as time alternately burns out various tropes...
Eddard Stark’s Ethics of Honor
~by Kyle Cupp “Have you no shred of honor?” Ned Stark asks this question to the ever-plotting Lord Petyr Baelish toward the end of A Game of Thrones. The question exposes the Lord of...
My first piece in ‘The Atlantic’
Hey everyone…big shameless self-promotion for yours truly. I’ve published my first-ever piece in The Atlantic. It’s about fantasy literature and film. I ask whether we’re in a ‘fantasy bubble’. Take a gander, if you’re...
Harry Potter and the Art of the Epilogue
I still haven’t seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Deux yet, but I hear the epilogue is poorly handled. I was sort of agnostic about it in the book. Epilogues are hard....
Harry Potter and the Ministry of Magic
I’m going to write a few posts about Harry Potter in anticipation of seeing the latest, and final, film. Alyssa Rosenberg has a good list of the political lessons found in the Harry Potter...
Are you watching ‘A Game of Thrones’ yet?
You should be. But even if you’re not, this cover of the show’s theme song is sweet (via): I haven’t read anything fictional lately. Any good new fantasy stuff I should be reading before...
Tits! Swords! Edginess!
(Editor’s note: Erik’s praise for “Game of Thrones” drew me out of semi-retirement. Bear with me) One of the problems with easing constraints on a creative medium is that creators are inevitably tempted to...
TV Review: A Game of Thrones (HBO)
I have television in my house once again – for a little while. This is because it was cheaper to hook up television service when we were hooking up cable internet than to pay...
On Hobbits, Race, and Self-Contained Worlds
I come down closer to Jamelle Bouie’s side of the Hobbit argument than Adam Serwer’s. Jamelle argues that basically Tolkien’s story is one of the British Isles, and that the mythological backdrop of Middle-Earth...
A Blog of Fire and Ice
For the League’s fantasy aficionados (and Erik, who I know loves this stuff): Alyssa Rosenberg is blogging George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice. Here’s her latest entry.
Charmed Life
I finished reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life a few days ago. As far as young adult fantasy goes, it was quite good with more than a few unexpected twists. It wasn’t as funny...
Science Fiction Friday
io9 lists the best science fiction novels for fantasy fans. I’m not familiar with any of these selections, but I’ll go ahead and recommend Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth, Gene Wolfe’s Book...
The economics of magic
I am perhaps four fifths of the way through the fourth of the Malazan books – House of Chains – and there is a moment in this book in which a character muses about...
And now for something completely different
I realize that I have been teetering on the brink of some form of madness or obsession the last couple days, though I believe it was madness based on reasonable grounds and sound logic....
