Source: litlists
LIT LISTS: TOP 10 SUPERNATURAL FAMILIES
Jennifer Lynn Barnes has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science and used her research to imagine the werewolf world in her first novel, Raised by Wolves.
For the Guardian, Barnes named her top 10 supernatural families.
Paige, Lucas, and Savannah (Women of the Otherworld series by Kelley Armstrong)
I love that we’ve seen Savannah (part demon, part sorcerer, part witch and altogether unprecedented) grow over the course of the series from a 12-year-old kid to a 21-year-old striking out on her own – almost as much as I like the way inheriting custody of Savannah forced Paige, a temperamental young witch, to grow up overnight.
Read more here…
Source: orbitbooks
HOW VIDEO GAMES AFFECT WRITING
Greg Bear, author of the upcoming Hull Zero Three, talks about the relationship between videogames and writing over on kotaku.com. And, he settles the age old debate (that age being about five years ago) “are games art?”
“Roger Ebert has said that video games cannot be art. Similar judgments have been made over the decades and centuries about novels, plays, movies, television, comic books, and of course science fiction.Now, videogames are up in front of the Supreme Court. Once again a new and innovative form of art and entertainment is being put through an almost ritualized process of legal justification.”
Read more here…
Source: sffantasy
OVER IS OVER
A few days ago, a friend of mine in the industry pointed me to a blog post by someone else in the industry. (Names withheld to protect the innocent, the guilty, and me.) It was a pretty long post, and it covered a bunch of specific details, but the gist of it was that “steampunk is over.” That there’s nothing left of the genre but people imitating other people in the genre.
Seems to me that I’ve heard that before.
I hear that superhero movies were over–a couple of years before Batman Begins, Iron Man, and (especially) The Dark Knight.
After the initial peak of popularity for Anne Rice, Tanya Huff, PN Elrod, and White Wolf’s Vampire: the Masquerade, I heard that vampires were over. I’ve heard the same said more recently, in the wake of Twilight.
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Source: thenewyorker
HARRY POTTER AND RELIGION
No book in recent times has been as maligned by a religious group as the Harry Potter books have. Cries of Satanism, you’ll recall, attended the release of each new book, from Christian parents worried that their children would be lured into the occult. But it’s also true that no book has been defended as vigorously by a religious group as the Harry Potter books have—and the same religious group at that.
For years now, Christian writers have been delving into Harry Potter searching for proof of holiness (or lack thereof) with the same vigor the Inquisition brought to its task centuries ago. Some find nothing but the devil lurking inside (as in “Harry Potter and the Bible: the Menace Behind the Magick”); but…
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Which supernatural families would you add to the top 10 list?
Nothing is ever truly over. Unless your 1980’s-hair-sprayed-bouffant-out-to-there hair. (Who knows that might make a comeback too.) However, I think Steampunk never really took off in the mainstream like vampires did. So could it possibly be “over“? What are your thoughts?
