(no subject)

[eldritchhobbit]

Happy early birthday to onegoat and roo2. May you both have terrific days and wonderful years to come!


In other news...

* A new interview with me is up today at Journey to the Sea: "Native America and Speculative Fiction: Interview with Amy H. Sturgis."

* Librivox.org has released new unabridged readings of interest to genre fans:
-- The Door through Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley
-- Librivox's Short Science Fiction Collection #24 by C.M. Kornbluth, Harry Harrison, and Philip K. Dick, among others
-- Librivox's Short Ghost and Horror Collection #5 by Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Hope Hodgson, among others

* From Wired: "10 Sci-Fi Movies We’d Like to Throw Into a Black Hole."

* It's here! Hog's Head Conversations: Essays on Harry Potter is now available at Amazon. This collection includes my essay “When Harry Met Faërie: Rowling’s Hogwarts, Tolkien’s Fairy-Stories, and the Question of Readership,” as well as essays by Travis Prinzi, Colin Manlove, John Granger, and many more. A review and list of the contents is posted here.




"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly."
- C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children"

Comments

[peadarog.livejournal.com]

I am going to learn that C.S. Lewis quote by heart. Brilliant.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I love that one myself. :) I use it in my essay, along with several other gems from Lewis. He knew how to take some of the critics down a peg or two.

[sittingduck1313.livejournal.com]

The Black Hole List should have included Alien: Resurrection, if only to remind the more obsessive Whedon fanboys that their idol is not perfect.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Good point! And that atrocious Wild, Wild West remake, too. *shudders* Maybe folks have blocked that out of their memories in order to retain their sanity.

[cookiefleck.livejournal.com]

Interesting list of black hole films. I missed seeing all of them except for the Star Wars "prequels." Hated the first one and only watched the others because I see everything that Ewan McGregor does. I don't know if it's the prequels or if it's the passage of time, but even the original SW films don't seem to have held up for me... I was shocked to realize that when they came on the TV last year and I idly watched part of one of them. Suddenly the dialogue and wooden acting were all too obvious, whereas before I'd always given them a free pass as it were.

BTW, in the current film 500 Days of Summer, they use a brief clip/glimpse of Han Solo to very sweet/funny comic effect.

Congrats on the new book being on Amazon! Fun cover!

Edited again to add this link because it just occurred to me that it is relevant to SW. I am going to this tomorrow night. What makes it particularly exciting is that Adam (and his sister) was a very good friend of mine in elementary school, one year older than me. He is the one who got me interested to comic books and in sci fi... .my sci fi soulmate as it were. I never saw him after the 6th grade because we didn't live near each other. So excited to be going to this!
http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2009/beckett.html

[sittingduck1313.livejournal.com]

Regarding your perception of the original Star Wars films, it just a case of the cloud of nostalgia being lifted.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

*snorts*

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I agree about the prequels. They upset me even more because I was quite taken with the idea of Qui-Gon Jinn and what he represented in terms of the Living Force, but I had to turn to fan fiction and fan essays in order to see his character taken seriously and done well. With the money and resources and talent at his fingertips, there's no excuse for Lucas to have created the kind of films he did... I'm all for giving the original trilogy a free pass, though. There's something to be said about nostalgia, and there's no denying the impact those movies made on me as an impressionable wee one.

Now I'm intrigued about 500 Days of Summer. :)

Thanks for the kind words about the new book! I'm so pleased it's out. I can't wait to read the other essays.

Wow, wow, wow, that "The Work of Adam Beckett" event looks amazing! And I'm sure it was all the more meaningful because you know him, and he had such an impact on your life as your "sci fi soulmate." What a great "full circle" moment, to have the chance to see this. I bet it was fabulous. I hope you'll post about it!

[ithildyn.livejournal.com]

Really enjoyed your interview. Will have to write down the titles of some of those books :) The only one mentioned that I've read is American Gods, which I loved.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Thanks a million! If you're looking for a short and thoughtful read, and you like vampires *wink*, I especially recommend The Night Wanderer by Drew Hayden Taylor.

[gloriana.livejournal.com]

Loved that Lewis quote :) :) I've never ever understood the disdain 'adults' have for things they consider childish: even the trend to having adult covers for books aimed initially at the children's market, while admirable for extending the adult readership of such books, is one that I tend to mock internally. Be proud of your reading tastes! Stand up for the excellence of juvenile fiction!!

The book I mentioned at the con, by the way, is 'Rejuvenile' by Christopher Noxon:
http://www.rejuvenile.com/pages/the_book/

I haven't bought it yet myself - somehow it slipped through the cracks - but now that I've found it again it has gone on my Amazon wish list :)

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

I've never ever understood the disdain 'adults' have for things they consider childish: even the trend to having adult covers for books aimed initially at the children's market, while admirable for extending the adult readership of such books, is one that I tend to mock internally. Be proud of your reading tastes! Stand up for the excellence of juvenile fiction!!

Yes, yes, yes! I couldn't agree more. :)

Thank you SO much for the recommendation of Rejuvenile. I hadn't come across that title before, and it's obviously something I need to read, and soon! I appreciate it.

[gloriana.livejournal.com]

(and answering these all at once, since my isp was holding my mail hostage yesterday)

What might be most of interest is the way he's covering quite a few areas, not particularly books. I do wonder whether in the text he relates this at all to ideas on how creative play can inform and stimulate better work practices.

(I wonder partly because I hang around with far too many programmers, many of whom are still wedded to comics and wargaming and all the stuff we were supposed to leave behind as kids; and partly because my husband works for a Very Well Known computing firm, where play is taken so far that the whole decor is in primary colours and the cafeteria comes straight out of kindergarten, I swear.)

Perhaps this need to hang on to the play we used as children is an outcome of the fact that our work demands increasingly inventive, independent and lateral-thinking forms of intelligence. Or perhaps it's another of those side-effects of shifting the reproductive and aging periods of our life forward. If you get it, do give us the potted review :)

[gamgeefest.livejournal.com]

Great interview. Lots of food for thought there. I'll have to check out some of those books.

I haven't seen most of the sci-fi movies, though I agree wholeheartedly about the Matrix sequels and Star Wars prequels, and the horrible Planet of the Apes remake.

[eldritchhobbit.livejournal.com]

Thank you so very much! I really appreciate it.

Oh my goodness, wasn't that Planet of the Apes remake the worst? *shudders* I'm with you. I rewatched the original not too long ago, and it still holds up amazingly well. The makeup (and the acting beneath it) was so well done, it doesn't call for a new "re-imagining" anyway.