Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 8

Shakespeare's King Lear Had a Happy Ending for 140 Years

First, some quick announcements:

The latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct is about America’s proud tradition of psychological warfare.

Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the final volume in my young adult trilogy, is out in paperback. It’s nominated for the Locus Award for young adult fiction, and the Lodestar Award! (If you are a Hugo voter, all three books in the trilogy will be in the Hugo packet.)

You can download the Phoenix Papers which detail the influence of dark money in San Francis...

Don't Believe the Hype about Young People and "Peer Pressure"

Lately I’ve been thinking about Blind Tom. (Who am I kidding? I’m always thinking about Blind Tom.) I learned about Blind Tom from my mother, who’s a historian.

Basically, England became a Protestant nation under Henry VIII, and remained so under Henry’s son, Edward VI. But when Edward died, he was replaced by Mary I, aka Bloody Mary, who restored England to Catholicism. Once Mary was on the throne, church officials set about trying to eradicate any remaining Protestant heresy in England.

Which ...

What Women Want: Mel Gibson's Creepiest Movie?

First of all, some housekeeping...

Voting is now open for the Hugo Awards, which includes the Lodestar Award for young adult fiction. For the third year in a row, my young adult Unstoppable trilogy is on the ballot, which is a huge honor. This time around, Tor Teen and I have decided to provide all three books in their entirety in the Hugo voter packet — so if you're a Hugo voter and you haven't yet read my action-packed, super queer, silly/scary space opera, now is your chance to jump on board ...

Some Like It Even Hotter: An Incomplete Guide to Gender-Flipping Comedies!

I used to have an obsession with films where the main character changes gender, for reasons which might be kinda obvious. There's a huge and somewhat bizarre subgenre of gender-swapping comedies — this was a huge trope in 1990s-2000s cinema for some reason.

Back in the early 2000s, a local indie newspaper hired me to review every new gender-flipping comedy that was coming out, and there were a lot during that time. I sat through tons of these films, so you don't have to.

So here's an incomplet...

Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st Century Star Trek

Hey, before we get started — this is the day! The paperback of Promises Stronger Than Darkness is out today! The legendary Captain Argentian, the galaxy's greatest hero, is back at last, and she's... getting drunk and disgracing herself. You can now get the whole of my young adult space fantasy trilogy in paperback. And if you want a signed, personalized, doodled copy, try Green Apple Books — they ship all over the USA.

Okay, with that out of the way... Let's talk Trek!

Back in 2022, I wrote a ...

The Incredibly Risky Scheme that Bill Gates Keeps Pushing

Climate change keeps getting worse: 2023 was the hottest year on record, and it's not even close. Despite increasing investments in clean energy and other reasons for optimism, we're still pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. And meanwhile, OpenAI's Sam Altman, at the Davos forum in January, confessed that the energy needs of the semiconductors that power OpenAI's apps have turned out to require much more energy than people had expected, which means we're going to have to burn a fu...

Writing Trans Stories For Fun (and Liberation)

The Trans Rights Readathon is going on right now. Roughly a thousand people are reading trans stories and celebrating trans narratives, while raising money for trans causes. I highly encourage you all to get in on this! Also, this Sunday is the Trans Day of Visibility.

So I thought for this week's newsletter, I would share some stuff I've learned/decided about writing trans stories.

First, a shameless plug: if you're looking for stuff to read for the Trans Rights Readathon, you might consider ch...

Prestige Creates a Permission Structure for Experimentation

I absolutely loved the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace when I read it back in the day. I devoured it, forcing myself to read all of those bloody footnotes to pick up every weird bread crumb, and reveling in how silly and yet cohesive the whole thing felt. It was one of the books that fueled my determination to try and write fiction myself, along with Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love and Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring.

But I often think that if you s...

I Stopped Loving Captain Kirk

I used to look up to Captain Kirk, Star Trek's fearless leader, when I was a kid. When I was seven or eight, I had a homemade Starfleet captain shirt, which I wore constantly until it wore out to shreds. Kirk was one of my all-time favorite heroes.

And then something terrible happened: I got a job.

In my early twenties, I had a string of bosses who were what I can only describe as bullies: they were psychologically abusive, they expected you to laugh at their terrible jokes, they sat unrealisti...

My Favorite Comedy Films of the 2020s (So Far)

Last week, I told y'all about one of my favorite comedy TV shows, Extraordinary. (The second season is out now on Hulu, or on Disney+ outside the USA!) And I also listed some other TV comedies that I've been enjoying a lot. But there are also a metrick fucktonne of great comedy films coming out lately!

Movies can be funny! It's a revelation.

I don't know about you, but I've been needing to laugh a lot these days, as the world slowly melts into a toxic slurry. (I don't have anything against Dark...