I said that aloud as I sat stone cold sober at the World Fantasy convention in Saratoga Springs last fall. All over the lobby, bright faced young writers fresh out of workshops gazed covertly at editors and agents who passed them by with that blank eye that acknowledges no one. Desperate older [...]

The Technological Singularity is a popular trope in science fiction that promises the birth of superhuman intelligence. Whether this entity arises as an artificial intelligence or through the amplification of our own brains, humanity may be forced to radically alter its way of life just to survive.
Vernor Vinge, author of [...]

INTRODUCTION
Pro wrestling is a form of fantasy storytelling, though Wrestlemania is never reviewed in Locus, the pseudo history of championship belts has no place in John Clute’s encyclopaedias of fantasy or science fiction, and there are no directions to "Parts Unknown" in Alberto Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Perhaps [...]

I have heard, more times than I care to admit, what I call the language of defeat. I’ve heard it on panels and on blogs, at genre conventions, at books festivals, and at academic conferences over the past decade.
This language of defeat has to do with accepting a paradigm of the [...]

I’m half-Mexican. It doesn’t matter much to my everyday life, I look far more like my distant cousin Jerry Falwell than I do like my other distant cousin, Jamie Escalante. It only really matters where there’s a gathering that requires both sides of my family, which only happens about once every decade or so. My [...]