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 …
Continue reading Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)
Last week I talked about Guy Gavriel Kay reading from his upcoming historical fantasy Children of the Earth and Sky at the World Fantasy Convention 2015 at Saratoga Springs, NY. This week, I continue my account of the weekend's events and provide a paraphrase of my interview with Charles de Lint. First, allow me to talk …
Continue reading World Fantasy Convention 2015, Part II: My interview with Charles de Lint
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 …
Continue reading MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part III: Attebery, Politics, and Worldviews
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) …
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 …
Continue reading MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part I: On Satyrs, Derrida, and Names of Power
Lately my blog posts have been slowing down because of the attention I'm giving to my research assistantship with Professor Robert Lecker at McGill University--we're researching the history of literary agents and agencies in Canada. As such I have not had the occasion to post about my experience of MythCon 2015 as I did with MythCon …
Continue reading Pacifism and Kenneth Morris’s The Chalchiuhite Dragon
Old Norse heroism seems to be in vogue these days, given the popularity of Thor and the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which is steeped in Norse mythology. Furthermore, the classic literature of the North has been gaining academic readerships ever since the publication of the Penguin collection The Sagas of Icelanders in …
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 …
What happens when you combine Robert Graves's The White Goddess with Martin Scorsese's mafia flick Goodfellas? I'm not sure, but it wouldn't be far from Charles de Lint's 1988 'mythic fiction' novel Greenmantle. Called the father of urban fantasy, Charles de Lint is the author of dozens of novels that combine fantasy with mainstream fiction. …
With the release of The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies in theatres this week, some of my MythCon friends and I decided to participate in A Battle of 5 Blogs. We will all be posting about the movie, which concludes Peter Jackson's trilogy. Although I have heard rumours of Jackson's plans to make The …
Matthew Rettino 