Oh, Nnedi Okorafor. You make the unknown familiar and the familiar delectably strange. You make magic more than just mathematical formulae, and you make math into magic. You turn earth into history, history in to myth, and myth back into reality. And you have really awesome hair. What can you not do? If there is …
The Library at Mount Char is one of my favorite books of 2015, and I sat down with author Scott Hawkins to discuss languages, dogs, and homicidal librarians. Christina Ladd: What had you picking languages as the focus of your book? Scott Hawkins: Part of it was my academic background in computer science, so I …
You know the adage “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”? Of course you do. No matter how much you might want to take issue with that, just don’t judge this book by this cover. I’m not sure what happened, but the text and the image don’t match at all. The jaunty, over-bright colors, the …
Angels are tricky. They’re not like vampires or werewolves (obviously): their motivations are opaque, and their weaknesses are practically nonexistent. They make poor monsters as a result, and even poorer heroes, prone to perfection as they are. Even worse, they’re often portrayed as extensions of a greater force; it’s not even clear if they have …
Perhaps no other book has influenced my thinking about freedom of expression and the power of art as much as The Merro Tree. Yet when I tell people that, I get blank stares. It’s positively criminal that this book isn’t up there with Fahrenheit 451. Then again, Fahrenheit 451 is the kind of book that you …
People complain that they’re sick of vampires, that they’re overdone or just done, and I can understand that. There have been a lot of (ahem) pale imitations of Stoker and Rice, far more than good and original vampire fiction. But I’ll never really get tired of vampires, the same way I’ll never get tired of dragons …
Full disclosure: I am a librarian. (Among other things.) Librarian stereotypes are largely mild, often going so far as a severe, buttoned-up woman who shushes people and no further. But of course, then we have the Sexy Librarian, most notable for nearly breaking up Troy and Abed that one time… …and the eager naïf, perhaps …
One of the most common ways to build a fantasy setting is to base it on some certain aspect of the real world and then make as many–or as few–tweaks as possible. For a long time, all we got were variations on medieval England. Then, slowly, other times and cultures began to trickle in. We’re …
Last night I was a real rockstar and went to bed at 10 PM. I woke up refreshed from a dream about Mads Mikkelsen, and had tea and homemade scones for breakfast. And yet, I still don’t have the energy to care much that Crystal is ending, or how it ends. We drop back in …
Geekly Essential means that something is so good that it deserves to be discussed long after it was released. It may be 10 years old, but it is still worth your time. Here are my picks for the top three anime (films). I’ve specifically limited myself to standalone movies, since it doesn’t seem fair to …