It’s Friday, friends, and I’m working all day tomorrow at a conference. Here’s hoping that you have a wonderful and restful weekend, and that if I don’t get enough sleep (I won’t) or find a reasonable place to park (I won’t), I at least manage to buy some terrific books at discount last-day-of-conference prices. All the excuses people give for making shitty racist movies, and why none of them are that convincing. (Clap your hands if you are pleased to see Ghost in the Shell bombing.) On feminist SF writers and the dystopian worlds they create. And it’s got a…
10 CommentsReading the End Posts
Using a Marvel Unlimited gift code from my beautiful pal Memory (thanks Memory!), I finally read Marjorie Liu’s run on X-23, just in time to know a bit about the character before watching OLD MAN LOGAN MOVIE. The run went through several artists, my favorite of which obviously was Sana Takeda, with Phil Noto as a close second. If you’re not au courant with what was happening to the X-Men around the time this series came out (early 2010s), there’s kind of a lot to catch up on, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend this series as a starting place for…
4 CommentsEsa Khattak and his partner Rachel Getty are back in a sophomore mystery called The Language of Secrets, in which Esa is called in to investigate the death of an undercover agent killed while investigating an extremist terror cell. The cell is still planning an attack in Toronto, so it’s vital that Esa should investigate the murder without letting the cell discover that the dead man, Mohsin (a university friend of Esa’s), was an agent of law enforcement. I don’t read a lot of mysteries, so I feel unqualified to speak to the success of the book as a mystery.…
3 CommentsBecause I am perverse, the first Superman comic I ever read was Superman: Red Son, by famed Scottish comics creator Mark Millar, whose name I thought sounded vaguely familiar when I was scanning the comics shelf at my library. The premise here is that instead of being dropped in the middle of Kansas, Superman ends up in a Ukrainian collective farm. He fights for Stalin, socialism, and the neverending expansion of the Warsaw Pact; while American scientist Lex Luthor plots how to bring him down. Fun, right? Art is by Dave Johnson, Andrew Robinson, Kilian Plunkett, and Walden Wong; colors…
7 CommentsA man named Ben Blatt analyzed — among other things — the gendering of certain terms and descriptions in fiction. My favorite finding is that male writers were 75% more likely to depict female characters interrupting male characters. TYPICAL. On diversity in historical romance. Given the history of Nazi appropriation of medieval studies and folklore, I was particularly interested in this February series at the Public Medievalist about people of color in the medieval world. The introduction to the series is here, and you can click through to the other pieces in it. Well this story about a doctor who…
15 CommentsWhat a weird, weird book. It reminded me a little of Nick Harkaway with the quills retracted (does that metaphor work? do porcupines retract their quills ever?). Version Control is a time travel novel with very little time travel, a story about humanity and loss from whose human characters I felt distant, a novel of ideas that sometimes made me think brand new thoughts and sometimes made me feel very tired of humanity (although not in the way the author maybe intended). Philip Wright has not built a time machine. It’s a causality violation device, and so far it has…
22 CommentsWhat’s that you say? Somebody wrote a book about creepy fairies and mental health treatments? YES THANK YOU, I DON’T MIND IF I DO. Borderline has been garnering all the accolades this past year in SFF circles, most recently a well-deserved Nebula nomination. It’s about a filmmaker called Millie who has borderline personality disorder (BPD hereafter) and is a double amputee following a suicide attempt the year before. A mysterious woman named Caryl shows up at her mental hospital and offers her a job with the equally mysterious Arcadia Project. Work with us for a year, says Caryl, and at…
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