This is the fifth of the Hugo finalists and, probably, the most important one. If you could distill the Hugo short fiction category into a platonic form, it would look very similar to this piece, Blood is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon. And now I have to review it.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Blood is Another Word for Hunger”Category: Uncategorized
Reading the Hugos (2020) Ten Excerpts from an Annotated… oh God that’s a long title.
Some particular trends in genre literature have become obvious during the past few years. One of them is the use of Brobdingnagian titles, a compulsion to write paragraph-long titles, some of whom even give away the plot. I suspect this may have started as a quirky, ironic thing to do, but I don’t think it’s funny unless you are lampooning or referencing some stuffy style like academic papers or writing comedy. And, to be fair, that’s to some extent what this story is doing—referencing, not the comedy.
The complete title of this very short piece by Nibedita Sen is Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island, which is way less interesting than my alternative title: The lesbian cannibal she-devils of Ratnabar Island. It’s mating season… and they want your blood!
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Ten Excerpts from an Annotated… oh God that’s a long title.”Review: The Long Long Long Long rescue, by Robert Zoltan.
The Hugo season of science fiction & fantasy is on, so what better way to start than by reviewing something that isn’t a finalist, that I actually enjoyed, and that none of you have even heard about?
Continue reading “Review: The Long Long Long Long rescue, by Robert Zoltan.”On commas. This is a post about boring commas—like, with what kind of exciting title do you think I’m going to come up with?
I occasionally proofread texts, and adding missing commas probably takes up half of my time. Removing superfluous ones is a smaller issue, but it’s a close contender. The third, if anyone is interested, is surely missing hyphens in compound adjectives. So, this will be a post about commas and, since they are related, semi-colons. However, the goal is not to remember any list of 8, 10, or 17 seemingly arbitrary rules but to understand the underlying logic, which exists.
Continue reading “On commas. This is a post about boring commas—like, with what kind of exciting title do you think I’m going to come up with?”Reality strikes back.
If you are like most people, you are either isolated at home or forced to share your usually crowded public transport with even more people because some genius thought cutting down travel frequency is a good way to avoid crowds. And if you happen to live in real, non-joke countries like Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea: You are one lucky bastard.
Some while in my country ice rinks are being repurposed as improvised morgues, let’s dedicate a few minutes to thing about what it all means. Hmmm… *thinking* Recently, I have had a lot of time for that *serious thinking*
A short note on the literary offenses of modern writing
As many of you who follow this blog, I came across this yesterday. Naturally, the general objection was about calling out a dead man while profiting from his name and all that.
(click on the tweet to see the image and see what I’m talking about)
Well, sure, but before my mind was even able to process that, what struck me the most was how uncomfortably written the entire thing is (or, at least, the first paragraph.) And I don’t mean typos, grammar errors, and such, but something that is deeper and harder to explain but is quintaessentially modern.
Continue reading “A short note on the literary offenses of modern writing”Level Inflation is a disease even clerics can’t cure.
I recently read a Twitter conversation about high-level cleric characters in D&D and their effects on the game, and I thought about writing something on that. But as usually happens, I can’t tell the difference between things I have already written or just things I have thought about, because as it turns out, I already had a post about this very same thing. But it was in my drafts folder, from July of 2016, unpublished. For reference, this is the tweet that triggered memories of that three-year-old dusty draft:
So here it is, with some minor variations, the post I wanted to write three years ago but never did for some reason:
Continue reading “Level Inflation is a disease even clerics can’t cure.”Superheroes and dumbing-up culture
Recently I read this post, Marvel Movies: In a Class by Themselves by J.J. Adamson, and that forced me to get off my lazy ass and write something I had meant to write for a long time.
Summing up, Adamson’s main points are that superhero movies cannot be considered proper art (I won’t get into that, though) and that there’s something inherently silly about the effort invested in making these movies, which he describes as fake. His example is Black Panther, which is, no matter how great the actors and director may be, still “fundamentally about a cool guy in a catsuit.“
Continue reading “Superheroes and dumbing-up culture”It’s not food; it’s water (or beer): surviving in fiction
I’m going to answer and comment on a short post I came across a few days ago, “Three Rules for Food in your Fantasy novel.” It’s a short list of common sense points so there’s nothing much to add, but I noticed this:
Can they carry a day’s worth of food or a week’s worth? Even when spread among several riders, you may have to consider a few pack animals to help carry the load but remember that even then they will not be carrying a month’s supply of provisions or probably a very wide-spread fare.
Three things here: (1) You probably can carry a month’s worth of food if you know exactly what you must carry (and you accept that, indeed, it won’t be a very wide-spread fare,) (2) notice that pack animals are mentioned, but not that they also have to eat (and they eat a lot,) and most importantly, (3) water is not mentioned.
Continue reading “It’s not food; it’s water (or beer): surviving in fiction”Tell me, don’t show me your characters’ emotions.
I have written other posts criticizing common bits of advice given to writers, and I have in fact hinted that I believe the emperor to all of them is naked, so here it is: Show, don’t tell. What is it good for? Not much really.
There are also some elephant-in-the-room-sized clues hinting that all this Show, Don’t Tell thing may be, at best, platitudes, and at worst, nonsense. First of all, the entire history of human literature. Pretty much everything written before the last 100 years was 90% Telling, with Showing sparkled here and there to enhance or highlight certain key passages.
Continue reading “Tell me, don’t show me your characters’ emotions.”
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