Last October, I had the great privilege to attend the World Fantasy Convention in my home city of Montreal at the Hôtel Bonaventure. It was a relief to be able to meet writers from the United States and across Canada after nearly two years of pandemic shut-down. If it had been held in another city, I probably would not have risked travel or asked for the time off work to attend.
R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War is "a big, messy mashup with inspirations ranging from World War II to Ender’s Game to Avatar: the Last Airbender."
This week I got profiled as a creative-to-watch with Graphite Publications.
Borges throws doubt on the very ability of language to represent reality.
Are you an aspiring fantasy and science fiction writer? If so, I have good news! I am teaching a speculative fiction writing workshop at the Thomas More Institute (3405 Atwater Avenue, Montreal) called "Through the Leaf-Mould: Speculative Fiction Writing." You will read selections from speculative fiction authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, …
Continue reading Course Offered: Through the Leaf-Mould: Speculative Fiction Writing
I'm back from attending Can-Con 2018 in Ottawa and figured I'd officially announce that I've made my first story sale. Hurrah! "The Pilgrim's Yoke" is the story of a pilgrim who seeks the waters of life and is refused. I wrote it as a sort of deconstruction of the hero's journey, while building on my …
It has been four months since I attended this year's Congrès Boréal, so a write-up on the conference is probably overdue. Nevertheless, I would like to share some of my impressions of my first foray into this predominantly French-language science fiction and fantasy convention. Congrès Boréal is probably Québec's main literary fantasy and science fiction …
Continue reading Congrès Boréal 2018: Differences between Anglophone and Francophone SF
The last example is a direct lifting from Chant--or as I prefer to think of it, a scene that was stolen productively.
Here the tradition of heroic fantasy is pure. There's no steampunk, cyberpunk, slipstream, or New Weird; historical fantasy, urban fantasy, and magic realism are likewise nowhere to be seen. This is the fantasy of the hippies and the anti-Vietnam protesters.
While a text asking you to believe in fairies and spirits might seem flaky, seeing as this gives us no solid program to reclaim the city, such faith does awaken the desire to see the postmodern, uneven city restored from its ruins
Matthew Rettino 