Robots! They are some of the most durable figures in pop culture — action movies have used everything from the robots who terminate to the robots who are in disguise, but not all robots show up in big budget Hollywood cheesefests. Some thoughtful stuff goes on here too. […]
When a writer puts a story down on paper, one version of all possible outcomes becomes the final version. The ending is part of a carefully constructed framework of theme and comment and all that good literary stuff, and it’s never going to change. For example, the evil […]
Fantasy novels are filled with war, and maybe that’s a default because human history is also filled with war. And violence is exciting, right? But I start to wonder: can’t we imagine a different way of telling a story? Fantasy is an imagined world after all. After reading […]
How many times do you read a book? For myself, I read the vast majority of books only once — it’s a simple case of too many options, too little time. When I was a kid, I often re-read books over and over again. My options were limited, […]
This has been the biggie: I’ve started re-reading the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. Wow, talk about a trip! I had almost completely forgotten the series and its impact on me years ago. I think this was due to the excessive sequels that tarnished the creativity of the […]
Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, a young adult fantasy novel from the early 1980s, always stood out in my memory as a formative read from childhood. Unfortunately I couldn’t really say what the book was about! Over the years, everything about it had faded. The Blue […]
Find t-shirts, mugs, totes and more at our new Guttermart location at Teepublic!
The Cultural Gutter 