Category: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Nick Lowe wrote some of the best genre movie reviews I ever read, as a regular columnist for the British SF magazine Interzone. Through an article at SJ Games’ Pyramid magazine, I found an old article by his called The Well-Tempered Plot Device, which I’ve either read before or read quoted at length somewhere else. The Stephan Donaldson racing game, the Leonard Nimoy poetry all sounds familiar, but is well-worth reading. And his points about the taxonomy of plot devices, plot coupons, plot vouchers are as funny and insightful as ever, and demonstrate how to easily deconstruct (well, deconstruct is what boring academic critics do; what cool critics like Lowe do is more properly rip to shreds) most modern fantasy – the current prime example (too late for Lowe to mention; this is an old essay) would be Harry Potter, but Tolkien’s already trod down that treacherous path..

I found Abigail Nussbaum’s blog through her comments at Andrew Rilstone‘s. I was intrigued to stumble across another Israeli Rilstone admirer, and delighted to find that she’s a discerning fantasy fan writing an intelligent book blog. Cool posts I read include (19th Century) rationalism vs. the unfathomable nature of the fantastic, an interesting piece about the slide towards anti-intellectualism in the Myst game series (which gives enough background to captivate me, someone who has never seen, let alone played, any of these games), and in geek culture in general (She cites a Farscape episode I saw, as Buffy, Angel and Battlestar Galactica).

(Why does it feel like I’m writing a report on this?)

Anyway, this is great stuff. Worth a look even for people who aren’t going to read long essays is her brilliant Condensed version of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which just nails it. Probably worth avoiding for a short while are her thoughts on the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (which I’m going to go read as soon as I finish the book).