Sunday morning at MythCon, and I took it easy, only getting to "Harry Potter as Dystopian Literature" for 10:00. Kris Swank framed Harry Potter not only in terms of the latest dystopian craze in YA fiction (Divergent, The Hunger Games), but also with the dystopian tradition of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The Dolores Umbridge-corrupted …
Tag: Harry Potter
Love & Sleep by John Crowley
The sequel to John Crowley's Aegypt (The Solitudes), Love & Sleep continues the story of Pierce Moffet's quest to write his history of histories, a book that in which he will propose that there is more than one history of the world. He must decide what to do with the posthumous, unfinished manuscript of historical …
The Alchemist’s Quest
To create the animated stone, take the juice of a Saturnine herb to extract mercury and evaporate it to get the purest earth. Join this with its like in equal weight and dissolve both with a crude metallic humor. Putrify for forty days. You may also calcine the earth with fire alone, join it with …
Ancestral Memory Point of View Experiment
Over the summer, I was debating what kind of new short story I should write, when I found myself gravitating towards the technical challenges and experimentalism that the Assassin's Creed franchise might inspire in fiction. What really got me thinking was how to represent the experience of entering an Animus in fiction. The Animus machine …
Top Ten Wainscot Societies
When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone gained unprecedented popularity, the world at large was introduced to a “new” concept: a hidden magical society that lived parallel to the everyday world, but scarcely—if ever—interacting with it. The idea of hidden societies, however, is not a new one. Many fantasy novels of all types include hidden …
Matthew Rettino 