Absolute Beginners first crossed my radar last week when a friend showed me a clip of David Bowie dancing on a typewriter. “Big deal,” scoffed I, a connoisseur of Indian cinema. “Merchant and Ivory did that with Hindi superstars ages ago.”* Discovering that David Bowie could tap dance […]
Nisi Shawl and Gerry Caravan discuss the work of Octavia Butler at the Library of America blog. “[M]uch of science fiction’s increasing inclusivity is due to Octavia’s presence. By modeling the creation of imaginary worlds in which she and those like her—and those unlike her yet also unlike […]
The Gutter’s own Keith shares from bonus content from his book Cocktails & Capers. It’s all about the Pastry War, Lucha Libre and Cinco de Mayo. “Alas, to keep the book to a reasonable length and not completely lose readers, I ended up cutting the pages about this […]
Not many comics start with a woman giving birth in the back of an old body shop asking, “Am I shitting? It feels like I’m shitting.” Hell, not many stories do period. But Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga (Image) does. And when the baby is born, it’s […]
At Tor.com, Chris Lough writes about the problems with J.K. Rowling’s “The History of Magic of North America.” “Fiction is a story we create, and history is a story we find, but the opposite is also true, and this makes the structure of both very similar. In this […]
The Faery Queene from the perspective of one of the Saracens by Saladin Ahmed. “I am walking a winding road of pale stone. Who am I? Where am I? I have answers, but they are forged falsehoods. For…days? Years? My brothers and I have been forced to live […]
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