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Crossroads: The Importance of Parody to the Speculative Fiction Genre
Last week, we talked about how every piece of humorous speculative fiction inevitably gets compared to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But as I outlined, Adams’ comedy of the...
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Crossroads: Satire and the Fantastic
NOTE: This week’s essay is actually an adapted form of an essay from December 18, 2012 that was originally published at The King of Elfland’s 2nd Cousin. Some changes, however, have been made from the...
View ArticleCrossroads: Tensions between SF/F and Mainstream Literary Fiction
Welcome to the first week of May! This month, I’m going to be taking a look at the often-fraught relationship between speculative fiction and mainstream literary fiction. I’ve always found the...
View ArticleCrossroads: Negotiating the Unreal in Magic Realism and Fantasy
Perhaps the most important insight I’ve gained from my research for my Crossroads series is that the borders between genres are very fluid, and the more one genre (or sub-genre) resembles another, the...
View ArticleCrossroads: The Cores of Literary Fiction and Speculative Fiction
The relationship between speculative fiction and mainstream literary fiction is complicated by decades of group identity dynamics, mutual ignorance, and overbroad critical generalizations about both...
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Crossroads: “Literary” Speculative Fiction and Literary Sensibilities
As I mentioned last week, trying to draw general conclusions about the relationship between mainstream literary fiction and speculative fiction is difficult at best. For every “general” hypothesis, a...
View ArticleCrossroads: “Speculative” Literary Fiction and SF/F Techniques
Last week, we talked about how works of speculative fiction deploy techniques commonly found in literary fiction. This week, we’re going to flip that coin and look at how mainstream literary fiction...
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Crossroads: The Difficulty of Police Procedural Speculative Fiction
Police procedurals are a complicated genre to explore because they intersect so fluidly with so many other genres. On the one hand, they solidly rest within the mystery tradition: there is a crime that...
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Crossroads: Speculative Devices in Police Procedurals
Character, Context, and Procedure: The Cores of the Police Procedural One can’t analyze science fiction and fantasy without running into certain words over and over again: World-building. Sense of...
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Crossroads: I Spy, with My Little Eye…Espionage in Speculative Fiction
Hello and welcome to August! I was away for much of July on a “blogging vacation”, and I very much missed you and our ongoing genre mash-up conversation while I was gone. Now that I’m back, this month...
View ArticleAsni’s Art Blog: Warriors, Hunters, Healers, and Death
Meet grandmother Buluku, Ogum the warrior, Oxossi the hunter, Oxumare the rainbow snake, Babalu Aye the leper who heals infectious diseases, and Exu, Papa Legba or Baron Samedi: trickster, guide of...
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