This essay was presented as part of a panel called “Reeling Beyond Realism: But to Reel in What?” proposed by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn Publishing for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in New York City.  I’m grateful to Rusty and Ken for proposing such a fantastic panel, and [...]

It all started with Lance Casebeer.
In the late 60s, a man with a name that sounded as if it’d come straight from a cheap crime novel started collecting old paperbacks. Casebeer, who’d once been a comic book dealer, traded one expendable pop culture item for another, and in 1976 he [...]

In recent years, popular science journals have been full of articles excitedly reporting "genetic markers" for depression, sexual orientation, alcoholism, IQ, and any number of other behavioral traits. The scientific journals cheerfully publish heritability statistics, which are often mistaken for estimates of genetic contributions to behavior, and used as justification [...]

"I’d like to throttle Frodo." Gary Gygax (1938-2008)
Take a group of socially awkward souls, a few gallons of Mountain Dew, a bag full of funny-looking dice, some sheets of paper, a rulebook or ten, add an argument about vorpal blades and Umber Hulks, and you have a scene that likely strikes [...]

I’m not a full-time writer. It’s much worse than that: I’m a guy with a day job who also has enough freelance work to keep a full-time writer busy. In the past couple of years I’ve made more money from writing than I have in my job as an editor at [...]

Siblicide and deadly sperm – both of these are just two examples of wide-ranging and downright creepy consequences of competing interests of males and females. "Battle of the sexes" is a cliché; however, it is fascinating to see this battle play out on the level of genes. Dawkins wrote about ’selfish [...]

I said that aloud as I sat stone cold sober at the World Fantasy convention in Saratoga Springs last fall. All over the lobby, bright faced young writers fresh out of workshops gazed covertly at editors and agents who passed them by with that blank eye that acknowledges no one. Desperate older [...]

The Technological Singularity is a popular trope in science fiction that promises the birth of superhuman intelligence. Whether this entity arises as an artificial intelligence or through the amplification of our own brains, humanity may be forced to radically alter its way of life just to survive.
Vernor Vinge, author of [...]

INTRODUCTION
Pro wrestling is a form of fantasy storytelling, though Wrestlemania is never reviewed in Locus, the pseudo history of championship belts has no place in John Clute’s encyclopaedias of fantasy or science fiction, and there are no directions to "Parts Unknown" in Alberto Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Perhaps [...]

I have heard, more times than I care to admit, what I call the language of defeat. I’ve heard it on panels and on blogs, at genre conventions, at books festivals, and at academic conferences over the past decade.
This language of defeat has to do with accepting a paradigm of the [...]