There’s a puzzle I don’t know the answer to, but the more I look around for it, the more I see it. Most of the time, it’s amusing. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me.
So, funny story. Back in 1998, I was at Clarion West. One of my classmates turned in a story about [...]

Hammer Films: The name conjures images of sinister images in garish color, of Frankenstein, Dracula, and a thousand other terrors of the night.
Like some monstrous creature in one of its own films, Hammer has returned from the dead. After a 43-year absence, The Woman in Black recently hit American theaters, with the promise of further [...]

This essay is a result of some thoughts that occurred during one of the weekly FeministSF chats on Twitter, when we were discussing exceptionality of female characters in urban fantasy novels—that is, their tendency to be the only woman in the book. This essay is meant to summarize some thoughts on [...]

Virtual worlds. Terraforming complexes. Star-spanning generation ships. Science fiction is chock-full of massive technological artifacts born of humankind’s desire to create, to explore. What do they all have in common? They all consume energy like black holes swallow stars. Computation, mechanization, acceleration. If the future’s getting faster, it’s certainly getting more energy intensive.
Even when SF [...]

A few years ago, I was at a workshop with an author who I deeply admire and personally enjoy. We were talking about community, and what made up our community, and it became clear very quickly that we had completely different definitions of the word. She meant something like "people who mutually acknowledge themselves to [...]

Call them folk tales, wonder tales, or fairy stories: Fairy tales have a history of adaptation that was born long before some Italian wrote one down on paper in the 1500s. They have celebrated renaissance, preached religious values, and outlined basic moral behavior, with a little adventure, magic, and witchery thrown in for entertainment value. [...]

Look.
I’m sitting down to have this conversation with you as a friend, as somebody who loves you. As somebody who’s devoted thirty-odd years of her life to you.
We’ve all made some mistakes. We’ve all had moments in our lives when we got a little self-important, maybe. Where our senses of humor failed us.
I’m as guilty [...]

American popular culture—science fiction and otherwise—feasted on the Cold War’s stew of paranoia, incessant competition couched in terms of progress, and threat of mutually assured destruction right up until the tension could, without a doubt, be declared over with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that Soviet-phobic films [...]

My main complaint, and reason my interest flagged, was that both the characters and setting seemed flat.—SF Reader on A Shadow in Summer
…an imagined world of this quality: for a city as graceful and fascinating as Saraykhet, and for such persuasively human characters.—Strange Horizons on A Shadow in Summer

One of the things that my wiser [...]

Little excites our sense of adventure more than an attractive ruin: a castle on a hill, a vine-clutched pyramid, a masonry wall sheltered in a natural cave. Ruins appear in a variety of roles in the fantasy tale—and it’s rare indeed to find a fantasy without them. Some are indelible settings for pivotal scenes, like [...]