I’m a sucker for fairy tales. A large part of that probably comes from growing up in the golden age of Disney animation. Another large part of that comes from the fact that fairy tales–the real, original ones–acknowledge the horrors of life as well as the adventure and romance. For Sarah Pinborough, the terrors are the …
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 …
Starting in the 17th century and continuing to this day, a debate has raged over who, exactly, is the father of calculus. Owing to favorable historical circumstances, or maybe to strange providence, Newton and Leibniz were both working their way toward it, sniping at each other along the way. One way or another, calculus was …