Tag
Fantasy
-
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.
-
Planetary Alchemy, or, Learning to Read the Earth with “Zelda”
“Tears of the Kingdom” lets you play through the planetary archive. In so doing, it suggests the pleasures of thinking at planetary scale.
-
B-Sides: L. Frank Baum’s “The Enchanted Island of Yew”
Many know L. Frank Baum for writing the book that inspired the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.” However, like any good magician, Baum had a lot more up his sleeve.
-
John Plotz on Earthsea, Anarchism, and Ursula K. Le Guin
“Rather than thinking of creative arts and sciences as ‘two cultures,’ we should realize that they’re running on parallel tracks.”
-
“A New Life for Us”: Zelda and the Future of Stories
“As I continued to wander its world, I began to realize Tears of the Kingdom marks a new achievement in art itself.”
-
Law’s Force, Law’s Farce
Books about law are often utilitarian. But perhaps sometimes we should embrace sublime uselessness.
-
Toxic Masculinity, Spectral Homosexuality
The secret of the Western—as Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” shows—is that its mythology nurtures a queer fantasy, hiding in plain sight.
-
To Suffer a Witch in “WandaVision”
Anyone who has been called a bitch-witch might have predicted the show’s big twist: there is absolutely no right way to wield your power.
-
A Labyrinth for Our Time
What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound?
-
The Realism of Our Times: Kim Stanley Robinson on How Science Fiction Works
“We’re in a science fiction novel now that we are all co-writing together.”[none-for-homepage]
-
“Echo” and the Problem of Chess Problems
When looking at both art and life, we recognize patterns and then we learn what those patterns signify.
-
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with …
-
Games for a Fallen World
Last year, Nintendo released its latest gaming console, a nimble and versatile product appropriately named the Switch, which transforms from transportable LCD tablet to a standard controller with a simple click. Released alongside the …
-
B-Sides: David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox”
The publication of David Garnett’s first novel, Lady into Fox, shot the author into literary stardom, winning both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tate …
-
In Memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin
If Ursula K. Le Guin’s death left only a small hole in the larger world, it poked a large hole in my smaller one. I was glad, of course, that her praises were quickly …
-
Coming of Age with Philip Pullman
People really like Philip Pullman’s characters. One of my best friends gave his daughter the middle name Lyra after Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of Pullman’s His …
-
Jane Austen Meets Sci-Fi
After two hundred years of being known as a genius, Jane Austen is now a brand, a marketing phenomenon. According to Wikipedia—so this is more universally acknowledged than necessarily true—in 2015, 25 Austen-inspired works were released per month, which suggests that more people are writing such fan fiction than are reading it. Most of these…
-
Politics and Play in Spain Today
Juan José Millás’s Desde la sombra (From the Shadow) is a short novel, not yet translated into English, about alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, and the power of …
-
Miéville’s Surreal Weapons
In his rambling 2011 photo-essay “London’s Overthrow,” composed in the lead-up to the London Olympics, China Miéville takes his reader through the ever-changing, history-drenched streets of his beloved city …
-
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the many marvelous feats of Francis Hardinge’s gorgeously written novel The Lie Tree is that it secures some pity for…
-
Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the roundtable featured presentations by Wai Chee Dimock, Heather Love, William Mills Todd III, J. Keith Vincent, and Cynthia Wall. To solicit brief position papers…
