This site is updated Thursday at noon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes
science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in
comics, Chris Szego dallies with
romance, and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the
screen.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Click here for the writer's bios and their individual takes on the gutter.
Black Cat Bone
Around the 5th time I read my nephew The Cat in the Hat, I started thinking. Sure, I might have been overthinking my thinker and overpuzzling my puzzler reading the book 15 times in half an hour and cutting it with The Cat in the Hat Comes Back!, but I think the Cat in the Hat is the Devil.
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"A Book's Natural Fate"
So you've written a book that fits the current vogue perfectly - let's say it's a grimy cyberpunk novel in the mid-1980s - does that mean you've guaranteed long-lasting fame for yourself? Probably not. But don't worry, a lot of your compatriots are suffering the same fate.
Oh, and I just happen to have an example at hand: George Alec Effinger's
When Gravity Fails, a perfectly fine book in its own right, and one that happens to have come back into print in a gorgeous trade paperback. But for some reason, I started having melancholy and/or realistic thoughts about the writing life after reading it.
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The Lady's Got Class
I once heard a reader dismiss a particular romance novel - and, in fact, the author’s entire writing career - because she felt the writer had no grasp of history. Her complaint? In the book, a character used a zipper several weeks before it was invented in real life. Now, I’m aware that historical errors can be very distracting, but it’s also possible to pay too much attention to the nicities of historical detail at the expense of the actual
story. More important, and thus more damaging when done wrong, is historical anachronism pertaining to character.
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