Jared Shurin's Blog, page 15

Fiction: 'Alf' by Mazin Saleem

Time travel was invented twice. First, by the woman who burst into the lab of Rosa Maravu looking like an older version of her. She gave the young physicist a hand-drawn plan, sobbed, then disappeared. Rosa worked on this plan but also became convinced of something: her own indestructibility, at least till that point in her future when she���d travel back and hand the plan to herself. Quashing her nervous nature, she took to parasailing and was struck by lightning (tow rope sizzling to the b...

Fiction: Alf by Mazin Saleem

Time travel was invented twice. First, by the woman who burst into the lab of Rosa Maravu looking like an older version of her. She gave the young physicist a hand-drawn plan, sobbed, then disappeared. Rosa worked on this plan but also became convinced of something: her own indestructibility, at least till that point in her future when she���d travel back and hand the plan to herself. Quashing her nervous nature, she took to parasailing and was struck by lightning (tow rope sizzling to the b...

A Matter of Oaths: An interview with Helen S. Wright

When A Matter of Oaths was first published in 1987, featuring an older woman as a space captain and centring on two men of colour in an intense, romantic relationship, it was a hard sell: 'I have a rejection letter from a well-known editor saying that they wouldn���t buy the book because the gay relationship was so integral to the plot, even though they weren���t a homophobe, nor were many in the SF audience (!). Apparently, I wasn���t "breaking new ground" and risked "alienating some reader...

He Said/She Said: Star Trek, Reboots, Discovery and The Final Frontier

In He Said / She Said, we're too lazy to write things properly, so we interview one another. A bit like a podcast, but with much worse production quality. 

Jared: Star Trek is something we talk about every now and then (including a whole theme week in 2009!), but even then, we've only ever scratched the surface. I mean, there's a lot of Trek: TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise (which I had completely forgotten ever existed), Discovery, a whopping 13 films, and a vast ecosystem of merchandis...

A Field Guide to Mary Stewart's Romantic Suspenses

"Stewart introduced a different kind of heroine for a newly emerging womanhood. It was her 'anti-namby-pamby' reaction, as she called it, to the "silly heroine" of the conventional contemporary thriller who "is told not to open the door to anybody and immediately opens it to the first person who comes along". Instead, Stewart's stories were narrated by poised, smart, highly educated young women who drove fast cars and knew how to fight their corner." (Guardian)

Title   Location Note Mad...

If/Then: The 2017 Pornokitsch Gifting Guide

ODY-C (Matt Fraction and Christian Ward)

Tis the holiday season! But giving stuff can be hard. Not because you're a bad person (you're great!), but because people are really difficult, and, odds are, they've got all the obvious stuff already.

To help you spend your hard-earned money on the people you love, we've asked our contributors, guests and online-passers-by for some gifting suggestions.

We've all followed a simple 'If/Then' formula - helping you find the right gift for that very spec...

Fandom, Metalheads, Goodreads and Tactility

Roadside service sign (1955) (via Space Age Museum)

A touching story

Professor Fiona Candlin has been trying to figure out why we keep putting our grubby little fingers on things in museums:

Touching, Candlin says, is "part of a much bigger, more imaginative encounter with things���trying to somehow make contact with the past." And there are countless ways of facilitating this type of contact, it seems. Recently, she says, a former head of conservation at the British Museum told her about...

From Christie to Bola��o: Adam Roberts' Five Favourite Puzzle Whodunits

I love puzzle whodunits. On account of my crime-novel-loving mother I grew up in a house full of them, which meant that���when I ran out of SF titles���I would pick a green-liveried penguin off the shelf and read that instead: Margery Allingham; Michael Innes; Ngaio Marsh; Edmund Crispin. And of course Agatha Christie. I read huge numbers of such books growing up. I still read them today.

So: one of the things I do as a SF author is write SF puzzle whodunits. I did it with a book of mine cal...

Eartha Kitt, Yzma's Skin Care, and "Snuff Out the Light"

"Snuff Out the Light" is a deleted song from Disney's finest movie, The Emperor's New Groove. You'll undoubtedly remember that Groove was oddly... ungroovy. There's a feisty Tom Jones number to introduce Kuzco and a gruelling Sting number over the credits, but, well, that's it. Unless you count this. All in all, kind of a waste of Eartha Kitt. 

It all comes down to Groove's seriously troubled production history. First planned in 1994 as a sort of "Incan version of the Lion King", the movie...

101 Explanations, or why good people are buying a bad thing

Anne and I were wandering around Knightsbridge (not our normal stomping ground!) and noticed the rise of, well, fuzziness in luxury fashion. It got us thinking: is fur back?

According to this piece in Business of Fashion on the fur trade, well - yes. And it is because of - wait for it - Millennials. The ultimate irony. After being accused of killing everything from diamonds to desktops, Millennials have actually been murdering bunnies.

Let's set aside the Bambi-ness of it all and think about...