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We Already Have the Wheel. Frankenstein 1 – Strange Conception

John Allenson

Frankenstein Part 1 – Strange Conception. We know the myth of how Mary Shelley came to write the novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.  The myth is fairly factual but the underlying biases give a completely false understanding of who Mary Shelley was, why she wrote the first science fiction novel (at least in English), and what was happening in the novel. The basic myth is that a group of important men and a couple of young women were trapped in a castle in Geneva and bored out of their skulls.  The poets came up with a contest to tell … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Ashes To Ashes

Death is an old and familiar companion to humanity, older than life and just as well understood. A predator that haunts our every step in a very literal sense. We are so aware of it, in fact, that a great many people actually fear it. That fear has caused, in part, the need to remove the dead from our sight, but paradoxically, given rise to high ritual and ceremony for the occasion. Funerals. An occasion that gives us an illusion of life to say goodbye to with a stunning array of preservative science before we entomb a beloved’s body in … Read more

Angel’s Bits: Off to Flame Con And About That…

This’ll be a short one this morning – I’m off to Brooklyn in a couple of hours for Flame Con. (Woohoo!) This will be the second year for this particular convention, which they project to have perhaps double the attendance of their first year. New conventions can be tricky. If organizers haven’t had a lot of prior convention wrangling experience, the learning curve can be huge. Some cons learn and grow, some, unfortunately, run into trouble and vanish for a few years or for good. Flame Con must be doing things right so far. They projected 1500 attendees last year … Read more

Sources of Inspiration: The Three Davids

I saw three statues of the same David in Florence last June. One was the original in the Accademia in Florence, done by Michelangelo. You may recognize him. He’s quite famous. Many fans from many different lands gather at his feet. They crowd around him, trying to get the best shot of his marble magnificence. I particularly liked this angle. I saw his marble twin, his copy down in the Piazza Signoria in Florence later. He was created to face the wear and tear of the elements, along with the abuse of the living. (The winged living can be particularly … Read more

Queer Fantasy Roots: Shapeshifters, Mpreg, and Artificial Gestation in Medieval Welsh Literature

We don’t often think of medieval romance (in the genre sense, not the emotional sense) as being a hotbed of queer themes, but try this on for size. As magical punishment for committing and abetting a sexual assault, two brothers are condemned to be transformed into pairs of animals–male and female in alternation–to learn to overcome their bestial nature and gain a deeper appreciation of women’s experiences. Cycling through the forms of deer, then pigs, then wolves, they take turns begetting and bearing sons, until all of them–the brothers Gwydion and Gilfaethwy and their three offspring–are returned to human form. … Read more

Asta’s Annotations: The Death of Punctuation, or the Decline of the Reader?

Anyone who knows me well will know semicolons are punctuation marks about which my views are passionate. Unfortunately, many digital/small publishing houses do not appear to agree. Notes from editors frequently come through to me with requests to remove all (or at least some) of my semicolons since they are ‘specialised punctuation’. My response to this (in my head) is to ask: Since when? Now, this column is by no means intended as a rant against any publishers or fellow editors; I merely use it to illustrate a point. I fully accept that each publishing house has its own preferences, … Read more

Boogieman In Lavender: The Strange Bust of HP Lovecraft

(I wish to thank the folks at the Gahan Wilson website for their kind permission to use the photo of the World Fantasy Award shown here.) The World Fantasy Awards were established in 1975. The award is a bust of legendary horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, designed by mordant cartoonist Gahan Wilson (himself no slouch as a writer!) For about twenty years there was no fuss, but now Lovecraft is being replaced. More than likely because of racial attitudes which cannot simply be dismissed by the fact that this was a man born in 1890 who lived until 1937. But … Read more

Ayres and Graces: He/She/They

Pronouns seem to be getting a lot of attention for something that on the surface seems like it should be straight (ha!) forward. So if you’re writing a story about trans, non-binary, or genderqueer people, how do you know which pronouns to use? How do you let your reader know these characters’ identities without bopping them over the head with a grammar lesson? It sounds like it should be easy, but things can get confusing if you’re unfamiliar with non cis-gendered people and how they prefer to be addressed. But not to worry, it’s very simple to know which pronouns … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Planck’s No So Constant

Something pretty awesome happened recently in the science world that must be driving student and hobbyist physicists and quantum mechanics bonkers. Teams from both Imperial College London and Trinity College Dublin discovered a new form of light. The science is pretty wild. A team took a particle of light and bound it to an electron in a process that I, personally, can’t quite wrap my head around. It’s awesome.  Already, data communication companies are sniffing around this breakthrough because of its implications for faster and more secure transmissions. But that’s just the short term. This new light particle can do … Read more

Angel’s Bits – SF covers retrospective

We were talking about covers the other day – the good, the bad, and the merely horrendous – which made me think of SF covers and how you can often pinpoint an edition’s decade by the cover art. Early SF cover art was largely the realm of pulp magazines, which then became pulp novels. Cheap art in a time when jobs were scarce and money tight. Oh, the places we’ve been since then… The 1930’s see the beginning of pulp art – flashy, colorful, eye-catching sometimes to the point of being lurid. Thoughts about space travel and vehicles were sketchy … Read more