Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)

M. John Harrison was part of the New Wave, a literary movement that, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, introduced Mainstream fiction techniques into the “straightjacket” of mass produced science fiction. The literary values of the movement, which increasingly drew from the soft sciences rather than hard sciences, can be identified with the kind …

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MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part III: Attebery, Politics, and Worldviews

Sunday 2 August 2015 was the date of my long-awaited presentation on Charles de Lint's multicultural utopia. Although this post will not include a copy of my presentation--that will be for next week, when I will discuss the final day of lectures at MythCon 46--I do include a significant panel involving the inestimable Brian Attebery, one of the key scholars …

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MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part II: Race, Raciness, and the Fifty Shades of Charles Williams

For this post I apologize immediately for the title and would like to state that most (the greater half anyway) of this post will be concerned with how Tolkien treats race in his fiction--not how Charles Williams is racy. The lurid revelations about Charles Williams, 'The Oddest Inkling,' that have now come forth were just impossible a) to ignore and b) …

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MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part I: On Satyrs, Derrida, and Names of Power

Every Friday over the next couple of weeks I will be posting notes that I made during this year's Mythopoeic Conference at the Hotel Elegante in Colorado Springs, CO. I presented a paper there on Charles de Lint and had the occasion to reacquaint myself with the much of the same gang from the last MythCon …

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The Chalchiuhite Dragon by Kenneth Morris

Perusing the books on sale at MythCon 45 at Wheaton College in Norton, MA this summer, I stumbled across a most peculiar historical fantasy novel. It was the long-lost masterpiece of Kenneth Morris, The Chalchiuhite Dragon. Well-known, if not actually famous, for his modern Celtic fantasies such as The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed …

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MythCon 45 Day 1: Prose, Genre, and Tolkien’s Genius

. This is a series documenting my intellectual journey at MythCon 45 at Wheaton College, in Norton, MA (8-11 August 2014). Although I will attempt to summarize the arguments made by presenters, the series does not replace the presenters' scholarship, but will represent my attitudes towards the topics. Having arrived early the Thursday, I had …

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The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I, by Stephen King

What do you get when you combine Tolkien and the Western? Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Meet Roland, the last gunslinger. He's Aragorn meets John Wayne. A solitary man “wandering but not lost,” he carries two six-shooters that were once his father's pistols. His single quest, which he pursues with an instinctual audacity, is summarized …

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