Jared Shurin's Blog, page 20

Four Fantasies: Fire Boy, The Brazen Gambit, The Never King and A Stranger at the Wedding

Fantasy time! Not, like 'the Royals come back to win the division and the Series' fantasy, we're talking about the more realistic stuff - with jinn, dragons, and, er, weddings.

Four recent reads, showing the breadth, depth and wonderful weirdness that can be found on the fantasy shelves.

Sami Shah's Fire Boy (2017). An early - or not so early - book of the year pick. To slap some labels on it, Fire Boy is a YA, edgy American Gods, but then, none of that is particularly accurate. Wahid is a we...

The Official Pornokitsch Taxonomy of Villains

So we���ve been at this Villain of the Month thing for a while now ��� since August 2016, to be precise ��� and by this point we���ve accumulated an interesting roster of villains. There have been 8 in total (we lost a month in there somewhere due to shifting schedules), which break down along the following lines:

5 men and 3 women 6 white, 2 non-white 3 villains from the movies, 3 from books, 2 from TV 2 witches, 2 gangsters, and 2 queens; 1 god, 1 assassin, 1 bureaucrat. (Yes, there���s s...

Review Round-up: A Queue, Two Devils, Some Magicians and an Empty City

I'm way behind on writing reviews - a combination of life, SPFBO reading, sekrit projects and watching Ariana Grande and Chris Martin sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" on continuous loop. But whilst we all wait for me to get my act together, here's a quick catch-up on recent reading:

The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (2016, first 2012). In an unnamed country, the people are ruled by a faceless bureaucracy. All paperwork challenging the state must be notarised by officials at the 'Gate', the accepte...

SPFBO: Some Unwanted Writing Advice

In 1921 - this has a point, bear with me - the compilers of What Editors Want interviewed a lot of the prominent editors (both magazine and publishing house) of the day. They all responded with pages of stuff: formatting advice, genre preference, commercial details, you name it. Very specific.

The best response was a single line from Atlantic's Ellery Sedgewick: "My selection is made according to the whim of one individual."

I think that's a wonderfully honest assessment of the subjectivity...

Fiction: "An Affinitive Romance" by John Kendrick Bangs

I. MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS'S IDEAL

Mr. Augustus Richards was thirty years of age and unmarried. He could afford to marry, and he had admired many women, but none of them came up to his ideals. Miss Fotheringay, for instance, represented his notions as to what a woman should be physically, but intellectually he found her woefully below his required standard. She was tall and stately���Junoesque some people called her���but in her conversation she was decidedly flippant. She was interested in al...

"The Tingler" (1959)

Thoughts Before Watching

So again, "The Tingler" is not a radio drama and again, I am excited as FUCK to watch this. Maybe it���s the title? And the fact that it���s in black and white? And the possibility that this could be anything, like ANYTHING and here we are, toes curled on the edge of this thing that could literally be ANYTHING. It could be the best thing in the world. Illustrious acquaintance says it could be a piece of poo.

Thoughts While Watching

Many disembodied faces screaming g...

Middle Earth Has Fewer Women Than Space

This research is from April 2016. The folks at The Pudding analysed thousands of screenplays and did a word count of male and female dialogue.

Unsurprisingly: Hollywood skews heavily in favour of dudes talking.

 Naturally, I looked for all the nerdiest films I could find. This was a lot of fun, although the results were... pretty bleak. Film % Female Exodus: Gods & Kings 2% Predator 4%  The Two Towers 4%  Return of the King 4%  2001: A Space Odyssey 4% The Fifth Element 5%  ...

SPFBO2017 - The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off

Pornokitsch will be participating the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off again this year, the third year of the competition.

You can learn more about SPFBO and its storied (if brief) history here. 

I'm reading 30 books, with the ultimate goal of choosing one finalist for the next round (the best part). I'll then read the other 9 finalists, score them (the worst part) and then there's an ultimate winner.

[11/May: Intro post (this one!)]

The MASTER INDEX for Phase I (Mark Lawrence's blog)

 

Why t...

Velvet: Sex, spies and stereotype

I recently saw a trailer for the upcoming film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a sequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service, a 2014 film based on a comic by Mark Millar and frequent collaborator, Bryan Hitch. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, Kingsman recaptured the over-the-top violence of their earlier collaboration Kick-Ass but was playing in the sandbox of a Bond-style spy-action-thriller.

In fact, the film was essentially a Bond spoof and, while it sought to make a point about class prejudice (alth...

Are genre readers more likely to separate the author from the work?

Discussion around separating 'art' from 'artist' is something that springs quite a bit - especially in the SF/F community. I have a lot of theories on why that's so:

we've got an academic fan tradition, and like to overanalyse context; we're a tight-knit community and live in one another's pockets; social media makes it so dirty laundry is everyone;  our particular blend of escapism often stems from creative people outside of traditional social norms; we sure have an awful lot of assholes w...