Tag
Fantasy
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Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.
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Am I Not a Dragon and a Brother
Here’s what everyone will tell you about the award-winning Temeraire series that Naomi Novik has just completed: it’s the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15)—with dragons. The series has expressive, pitch-perfect writing, glorious steampunk details, and jaw-dropping adventures. Fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels will relish Novik’s accounts of slashing battles and brilliant military maneuvers taking place both…
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Bro Uprising
With Pierce Brown’s lately concluded Red Rising trilogy, the phenomenon of the blockbuster Young Adult dystopian novel that brought us The Hunger Games and Divergent has reached its eye-popping baroque. The 28-year-old author’s vision of the future divides the human race by the genetically engineered color of their skin, hair, and eyes. Reds toil at…
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Once More Down the Rabbit Hole
By all means, celebrate the recent 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by rereading or finally reading the novel and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1872). But do also mark the occasion by picking up Gregory Maguire’s new novel After Alice, a distinctly 21st-century homage to…
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How to Write about Videogames
I remember his blue-plastic hair, drawn back in a little bun that looked octagonal. I remember the pointy hat that crowned him in the eyes of other players: “Sorcerer’s petasos +1,” the “+1” indicating that it was marginally better than the regular version, and exponentially harder to get. I remember the winding wooded streets of…
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Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics
What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. I can only speak for one childhood—and one adulthood—spent reading Le Guin, but I’d bet my last nickel there are thousands of us out there. Tolkien knew how to conquer Evil; Beverly Cleary and Louise Fitzhugh put…
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China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of physics: like the movement of any three objects in space held by each other’s gravitational pull, the movements of these suns defy prediction. Sometimes…
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Genre Wars, Amazon, and the Market for Heart: Where Do We Go From Here?
In the past year in books, two conversations made a descent into debate—one about genre, and the other about Amazon—without necessarily being cast as two sides of the same story. It is a portrait of the writer c. 2015, who faces new realities, a multiverse of post-apocalypses, and a punishing numbers game. In a sense it…
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Gallantry, Ishiguro-Style
Quaintness is history defanged, a past we render harmless by declaring it naive. It’s a form of retrospection somewhere between a sneer in the rearview mirror and longing’s backward glance, one modernity reserves for the ideals—and idealists—of a bygone age. Arthurian England has often received this aesthetic markdown on last season’s ethical attire. It’s an…
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The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like deodorant.” My favorite line: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”1 If you have…
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Do We Need Wonder Woman?
My two-year-old daughter plays on the beach in a tiny red, white, and blue swimsuit, her chest emblazoned with winged yellow Ws that need no explanation. At a glance, the suit appears of a piece with the branded Dora the Explorer and Mermaid Ariel gear sported by fellow toddlers frolicking on the shoreline. Unlike her…
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Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he coined—would soon colonize our imaginations and daily experiences. Despite his ambivalent representations of technological change, his work became something of a guiding vision not only for…
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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What’s the Matter with Dystopia?
Dystopia is flourishing. In the process, it is becoming routine and losing its political power. If current fiction is to be believed, postapocalyptic wastelands will in the not too distant future be as common as parking lots, deadly plagues as widespread as the flu, and cannibalism no more unusual than a visit to McDonald’s. Dozens…
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Behind the Dungeon Master’s Screen
From Dickens’s David Copperfield and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to Elena Ferrante’s Elena Greco, we are familiar with the fictional protagonist as novelist, or as novelist-to-be. Recently, 40 years after E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), we have seen the emergence of a new spin on this convention: the fictional protagonist…
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Invasion of the Funny Animals
“Funny Animals” is a genre of comics that is, like most things in comics, inappropriately named. Just as “comics” are quite often not comic and “graphic novels” are rarely novels, comics featuring anthropomorphic animals are only occasionally funny …
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The Essential Gratuitousness of César Aira
It is not in the least original to begin talking about César Aira’s work by recounting the technique that produces it. But it can’t be helped: Aira has made a discussion of his practice obligatory. To read him is less to evaluate a freestanding book, or a series of them, than to encounter one of…
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Odd Angles
Rjurik Davidson’s debut novel Unwrapped Sky is set in the fictional city of Caeli-Amur, a complex mixture of ancient Rome, steampunk industry, H. P. Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh, and Davidson’s native Melbourne. Unwrapped Sky is urban fantasy, which redeploys the pastoral and heroic conventions of traditional fantasy in a city context. The human and…
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Otherworlds
In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of the Lumière brothers and the magical stagecraft of Georges Méliès. In comics, we can find a parallel fork in the road in the pioneering…
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Baggy Monsters
In 2012, the New Yorker hosted a roundtable discussion on the question “Is Television the New Cinema?” Two years later, the New York Times asked, “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?” Apparently, television in its contemporary flourishing cannot be just television. One show often cited for its bigger-than-television ambitions is HBO’s…
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Russia Is No More
The future of Europe recedes far into the past, into a medieval world where Russia no longer exists—at least according to Vladimir Sorokin’s latest sci-fi marvel, Telluria (published in Russian in 2013, not yet translated into English). Sorokin, the bad boy of Russian letters, is one of the country’s most talked-about writers. His trademark blend…
