wisb-Guardian-Express

I've been fascinated with science fiction since I was about four years old, even though I'm fairly sure that I didn't know it was called science fiction in those days. There were puppet shows on TV like Supercar and Fireball XL5, and I dimly remember another show that had flying saucers like wobbling spinning tops that docked with a space station, but I've never seen that one again so I might have dreamt it -- it was all in monochrome and a long time ago. Then Doctor Who hit the tiny screen with a theme tune that could only have been made by aliens -- and nasty aliens at that. UFOs and bad robots seemed to be everywhere back then. 

I personally discovered a planet in 1964. I wrote an entire project about it, a huge scrapbook of cut-out pictures from magazines and hand lettered descriptions of this amazing new planet that I'd discovered in the school library called Pluto. It was a really great project, the best I'd ever done. My teacher called me a moron and sent me weeping like a baby to the back of the class. I was secretly pleased when Pluto lost its planetary status a couple of years ago. Serves it right. Bad planet.

Then came Star Trek and I was enraptured. We had, on our televisions (in colour), a black and
white representation of what it would look like to be on a spaceship travelling through the stars. To this day, if you want to make me happy, sit me in a cinema and project the view from the Enterprise as it slices its way through the galaxy. Watch those stars zoom past. Tiny points of light that are entire solar systems flying by and out of sight. Pure bliss.

Of course when I was a kid, I wasn't able to articulate exactly what it was about science fiction that entranced me. I did know that it wasn't the aliens. Daleks were scary as hell and cybermen were just clumsy precursors of stormtroopers, but neither were that interesting. Whatever aliens Kirk and Spock had to battle with in their styrofoam sets were all pretty useless in the end -- after all, we managed to defeat them all inside 45 minutes, right? I have to give the Borg a nod. They were really cool but they weren't really very alien except in their social structure. They did give us Seven Of Nine though, so they will forever hold a special place in all young heterosexual male hearts. But no, it wasn't the aliens that held my interest.

It wasn't the weapons either. Nuclear-ionised-plasma, mega-warp-reverse-polarity, pulse-phase-modulated photon-this and electro-that are simply a writer's way of getting themselves out of a problem they deliberately created in order to put tension into the narrative and keep everyone glued to their seats. If the future is to be about technology (and I sincerely hope that it is) then the weapons side of future tech is the least constructive and most boring.

No, what fascinated me then and fascinates me still today is first, the idea that the future holds the solutions to today's problems (I admit this may be weak-minded of me) and second, that one day we will get the hell off this tiny, stinking, life-infested, doomed rock and get out to the stars.

Yes. Ever since I was old enough to understand that we were on a planet, I've wanted to get off it. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfectly natural response. After all, if you lived on an island all your life, and could see another land over the sea, are you telling me you're not going to go there? You aren't going to walk down the track every day and look over the water to a huge lump of rock and not think 'I wonder what's over there?' Of course you are. You'll invent technology that floats and you'll go there. Then you'll look out at the horizon and think 'I wonder if there's anywhere out there that's better than this place?' And until you've gone to wherever you think 'out there' is and found out if it's better, you will never be able to rest. That's just the way human beings are made. If we weren't made that way we would never have left Africa and we would have died out like 99% of all the species on earth that ever existed. We are genetically programmed to be curious. It's a survival characteristic. Get over it.

We have to go. Not only in order to survive (because only an idiot would expect life on Earth to last forever) but because we're made that way.

About Slabscape:  Reset:
Take the most sophisticated A.I. designed mind that has ever existed, encase it in over fifty million cubic kilometres of diamond nano-rods and send it off on a twenty-thousand-year odyssey towards the centre of the galaxy. Then screw it all up by allowing thirty-two million humans to go along for the ride...

About the author:
S.Spencer Baker (1956~2106) fled formal education and family at the age of seventeen and refused to ever return to either. He spent a subjectively interminable, but retrospectively finite amount of time learning how to exploit the intellectual property of others until he re-remembered that his childhood obsession was to create his own intellectual property and get other people to exploit it on his behalf. Somewhere around the beginning of that seriously weird century that began inauspiciously in 2001 he started creating the not-at-all-weird universe of Slabscape. By 2011 he had published his first science fiction novel; Slabscape:Reset - a webback (being backed up by information, back-stories, glossaries and complete irrelevancies in an online resource at http://slabscapedia.com). By 2020 he had published several more novels and short stories in the series, including Slabscape:Dammit, Slabscape:Reboot and a compendium of the first three books along with a contemporary text dump of the ever-expanding Slabscapedia entitled; Slabscape:Thank Dice That's Over (The Doorstop Slab). If it had have been over at that point, it's likely that Baker would have slipped back into relative obscurity. Unfortunately, the development of information temporal displacement technology onSlab by Fencer Dean Twenty (collectively recognised initiator of important intangible query assets) in 1040 (Slab asynchronology) meant that a deluge of fan-fiction written by SlabAficionados was sent back to the mid-twenty-first century from dice-knows-when by dice-knows-who. On July 30th, 2069, Amazon.com received 876 new, entirely different, Slabscape novels into its e-library servers in San Diego all purporting to be written by Baker. Fortunately the California Disappearance destroyed all record of every single one of them, which is odd when you think about it because if they really had come from the future then how come the authors didn't know about the California Disappearance in the first place? Such are the mysteries that surround temporal displacement.

Baker chose to go ahead on September 4th 2106 at the exact time that Slab departed/will have departed/is going to depart Earth Orbit.

Dear Brave and Steadfast Reader,

Writing the horror novel, Fear in Appleton, was a grueling yet enjoyable process that took me over three years to complete. During that time, the book went through several drafts, including one where Michael Garrett, Stephen King’s first editor as credited in King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, provided input.

The idea that sparked Fear in Appleton was:

What if the reader could follow the journey a person takes from madness to death to becoming a ghost? Then, if the reader were given a front seat to the hauntings occurring thereafter, it would make for an exciting, creepy roller coaster ride. 

Adding to the fun, I thought:

What if someone who was afraid of everything in life, with a million phobias, could flip that around as a ghost doing all the scaring? 

Thus, Professor Terrence Crawford, a self-absorbed creative writing teacher with a fragile ego, was born. Naturally, since he was a writer, he’d want to narrate his ghost stories.

I realized that with a ghost narrator, I needed a warm, live body as a vehicle for typing up his exploits. It made sense to make Professor Crawford’s old boss, the English department head named Professor Starkley, that vehicle. So Crawford, after pushing people over the edge, would float back to Appleton College to induce Starkley to record his escapades.

As a big fan of edgy HBO shows like “True Blood” and “The Sopranos,” I began to imagine these hauntings as separate episodes that shared some connective tissue. However, I needed a way to link them. That linking agent, Angela Lacey, who was Professor Crawford’s obsession in life, became his opponent. But first, she had to become aware of his supernatural presence.

I made Crawford’s victims varied to give the sense of a ghost haunting an entire town. He could be anywhere floating around, trying to sniff out the fears of the populace. Yet, even as an incredibly powerful supernatural force, a residue of his humanity remained, and as a result, he couldn’t keep away from Angela. At this point in the novel, the stories go from the victims being varied and having nothing in common with each other to involving Angela in some way.

Finally, to send the roller coaster ride to its conclusion, I needed to get the ghost out of the English department and onto the campus for one last showdown. The character of Wesley sprang organically from the novel’s writing process. It just seemed like, after hopping around inside the minds of various victims, the ghost finally found the perfect host for his devilish purposes.

Then, as for the heroine Angela, she required something from the past, something clouding her present and causing her to fear life. It made sense to give her this burden so there could be a final battle between the ghost and her.

I had a great time writing this novel, and it’s gratifying to see it published on Amazon/Kindle. I hope you’ll download a copy and post a review after reading it. With forums such as this one, reading and writing don’t have to be mutually exclusive or isolating. Let’s keep the communication channels open so the ghosts and other things that go bump in the night won’t keep us under the covers.

Sincerely, 
J. Stephen Howard

You can learn more about Fear in Appleton here or on Facebook.  The book is available on Amazon.

I got a chance to see Hanna with my brother and sister the other day and thought I would offer some short, but sweet thoughts.

Plot:  Living in the middle of nowhere, Hanna is raised by her father, Erik, to be a skilled soldier in order to assassinate the woman who killed her mother.  When Hanna is ready, they activate a distress beacon and put a plan into action.  But Hanna must venture out into the real world with all its luxuries and technologies -- a world she knows little about.

Pros:  Hanna is an action-packed thriller which shows why Saoirse Ronan is one of the best young
actresses in Hollywood.  She is simply brilliant in this film (with her German accent and perfectly stunned expressions when she's shown something her character has never seen).  Cate Blanchett is equally amazing as the psychotic Melissa, and Tom Hollander (Beckett from Pirates of the Caribbean) puts on one of the creepiest performances I've ever seen.

Cons:  Honestly, I thought the soundtrack (by The Chemical Brothers) was lackluster and, at times, overbearing.  Half of the background noise involved annoying groaning electronic noises with drum machine rhythms.  The film really deserved a better soundtrack.

I also thought that the ending left a lot to be desired.  There's a major twist towards the end, but it needed more development in the actual story.  Likewise, some of the action involving Bana looked forced.

Overall:  The film is entertaining.  The plot moves quickly, the characters are fascinating, and the concept is slightly science fictional -- all good things for readers of this blog.

Directing: 3/5
Cast: 5/5
Writing: 3/5
Visuals: 4/5
Adaptation: N/A
Value:  $6.50
Overall: 3.75/5

The last episode of the year!  That means alcohol, a supposedly bad movie, and good old Christmas fun.

Download it and take a listen!

It's time for a new (and mostly random) feature on this blog:  the reading game!  Basically, I tell you what I'm currently reading and then hope everyone will do the same in the comments!

I am reading the following:

How about you?

We've all been waiting for this film like a dog waits for its master. And it is coming! From the bowels of Khazad-dûm...

What does everyone think? I quite like the look, to be honest. It's a good thing Jackson took the helm, because the film is certainly shining as a result!

Fantasy readers and movie-goers maintain an expectation that protagonists will battle supernatural forces. Those forces may manifest in humans (“bad guys”); however, when the supernatural element is diluted (or superficially offered in clichéd, familiar forms so that the protagonist literally battles a man) then expectations are not met. Consumers become disappointed. The lack luster reception of this year’s movie, Conan the Barbarian, is a good example of this expectation being unsatisfied.

Of course, Man vs. Supernatural conflict is ubiquitous across fantasy. Most recognizable of Supernatural antagonists may be Tolkien’s bodiless Sauron. Nearly three decades before Sauron stalked bookshelves and haunted rings, Conan creator Robert Ervin Howard originated the Sword & Sorcery genre by writing action-packed shorts exploring Man vs. Supernatural.

Sword & Sorcery was coined by author Fritz Leiber years after REH passed, but as he suggested the name he also clarified the role of the supernatural:

I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story… (Fritz Leiber, Amra, 1961) 

But it was Lin Carter who may have best defined Sword and Sorcery in his introduction to his Flashing Sword series (Carter, with L. Sprague de Camp, posthumously co-authored several Conan tales):

We call a story Sword & Sorcery when it is an action tale, derived from the traditions of the pulp magazine adventure story, set in a land or age or world of the author’s invention—a milieu in which magic actually works and the gods are real—and a story, moreover, which pits a stalwart warrior in direct conflict with the forces of supernatural evil. (Lin Carter, Flashing Swords I, 1973)

REH wrote twenty-one Conan tales, and no human antagonist persisted across them. Each story had bad guys/creatures/etc., but they were overt proxies for greater supernatural evils. Hence, the conflict was Conan (the Man) vs. Supernatural.

One reason the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie obtained better reception than the 2011 version can be explained by analyzing the core conflicts. In the 1982 version, Conan fought the serpent cult of Set led by Thusla Doom. But the movie was not about Conan vs. Thulsa Doom. Thulsa was just a representative for his serpentine god, and Conan was continuously fighting other representatives of Set, including a giant snake. In fact, Thulsa arguably was not even human since he transformed into a serpent!

On the other hand, the 2011 reboot pits Conan against the evil Khalar Zym. Khalar, a man, spends his entire life re-assembling the purportedly sorcerous Mask of Acheron (infused with enough magic to transform the wielder into a god and ruler of the world). But repairing the mask appeared inconsequential in that it did not provide Khalar with any powers, nor did it transform him into a mythical creature. The expected climax was a battle between Conan and the god Acheron, but instead viewers were treated to a magic-less melee between Conan and the man Khalar.

Were you disappointed in the recent Conan movie? 


About the author:
Looking for bloody action with genuine supernatural elements? Then I invite you to read my newly published novel Lords of Dyscrasia (click for excerpts). Enjoy the Underworld!
Early Review:  ForeWord Clarion Reviews, 5 Stars for Lords of Dyscrasia!  "...Outside of the works of Poe and Lovecraft, there are few, if any, novels comparable to [Lords of Dyscrasia]... Beowulf comes to mind both for its epic quality and bloody action... The pace is nearly breathless...

Lindberg, who also created more than 50 illustrations and the cover for this book, makes the majority of current popular fantasy fiction read like recipes by comparison. Lords of Dyscrasia is highly recommended, though not for the faint of heart."

Lords of Dyscrasia is currently available in ePub and Paperbacks everywhere!

I haven't done one of these in a while, which means I'm really far behind on all the weird stuff that has arrived on my doorstep (for school, for review, for teaching, etc.).

So now you get to see the crazy stuff I've been looking at in the last few months.

Here goes:

In Theory:  Classes, Nations, Literatures by Aijaz Ahmad

After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, to parts of Latin America and the Pacific Rim. With the Bandung Conference and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of Europe's former colonies banded together to form a common bloc, aligned with neither the advanced capitalist “First World” nor with the socialist “Second World.” 

In this historical context, the category of “Third World literature” emerged, a category that has itself spawned a whole industry of scholarly and critical studies, particularly in the metropolitan West, but increasingly in the homelands of the Third World itself. 

Setting himself against the growing tendency to homogenize “Third World” literature and cultures, Aijaz Ahmad has produced a spirited critique of the major theoretical statements on “colonial discourse” and “post-colonialism,” dismantling many of the commonplaces and conceits that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. With lengthy considerations of, among others, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and the Subaltern Studies group, In Theory also contains brilliant analyses of the concept of Indian literature, of the genealogy of the term “Third World,” and of the conditions under which so-called “colonial discourse theory” emerged in metropolitan intellectual circles. 

Erudite and lucid, Ahmad's remapping of the terrain of cultural theory is certain to provioke passionate response.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

Karen Lord's debut novel, which won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit. 

Paama's husband is a fool and a glutton. Bad enough that he followed her to her parents' home in the village of Makendha, now he's disgraced himself by murdering livestock and stealing corn. When Paama leaves him for good, she attracts the attention of the undying ones--the djombi--who present her with a gift: the Chaos Stick, which allows her to manipulate the subtle forces of the world. Unfortunately, a wrathful djombi with indigo skin believes this power should be his and his alone. 

Bursting with humor and rich in fantastic detail, Redemption in Indigo is a clever, contemporary fairy tale that introduces readers to a dynamic new voice in Caribbean literature. Lord's world of spider tricksters and indigo immortals, inspired in part by a Senegalese folk tale, will feel instantly familiar--but Paama's adventures are fresh, surprising, and utterly original.

Africa First:  Volume One by Various

From Focus Features, the premiere global brand in original and daring cinema, comes FOCUS WORLD. Charged with finding the most exciting new voices in international and independent film, Focus World is proud to bring you AFRICA FIRST: VOLUME ONE, the first in a series of short film collections from some of Africa's most compelling new talent. Focus' Africa First program is an initiative designed exclusively for filmmakers of African nationality and residence, and presents annual awards to the best and brightest from around the continent. After touring film festivals around the world, these Africa First short films are now available for audiences everywhere: Dyana Gaye's "St. Louis Blues," an invigorating traveling musical; Jenna Bass' "The Tunnel," a moving story of a young girl in search of her father; Jan-Hendrik Beetge's "The Abyss Boys," a coming-of-age tale amidst rampant corruption and gang violence; and Wanuri Kahiu's "Pumzi," a startling vision of the future.

The New Bloomsday Book:  A Guide Through Ulysses (3rd Edition) by Harry Blamires

This is a highly accessible, indispensable guide for anyone reading Joyce's masterpiece for the first time. A crystal clear, page-by-page, line-by-line running commentary on the plot of Ulysses.

Dead Head by Rosemary Harris

The talented Rosemary Harris continues to pick up steam, garner acclaim, and collect fans with her quirky, beloved Dirty Business Mystery series Fugitive Mom. That’s the tabloid headline that rocks Springfield, Connecticut when one of the town’s favorite ladies is discovered to be an escaped convict. With a little help from the always game Lucy Cavanaugh, Paula is hired to find out which of her neighbors is a fugitive from the law and why the long-kept secret has finally come out.

Dubliners by James Joyce (Norton Critical Edition)

Dubliners is arguably the best-known and most influential collection of short stories written in English, and has been since its publication in 1914. 

Through what Joyce described as their "style of scrupulous meanness," the stories present a direct, sometimes searing view of Dublin in the early twentieth century. The text of this Norton Critical Edition is based on renowned Joyce scholar Hans Walter Gabler’s edited text and includes his editorial notes and the introduction to his scholarly edition, which details and discusses Dubliners’ complicated publication history. "Contexts" offers a rich collection of materials that bring the stories and the Irish capital to life for twenty-first century readers, including photographs, newspaper articles and advertising, early versions of two of the stories, and a satirical poem by Joyce about his publication woes. "Criticism" brings together eight illuminating essays on the most frequently taught stories in Dubliners—"Araby," "Eveline," "After the Race," "The Boarding House," "Counterpoints," "A Painful Case," and "The Dead." Contributors include David G. Wright, Heyward Ehrlich, Margot Norris, James Fairhall, Fritz Senn, Morris Beja, Roberta Jackson, and Vincent J. Cheng. 8 maps; 20 illustrations

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming

A full-color graphic memoir inspired by the award-winning documentary-and the life and mystery of China's greatest magician. 

Who was Long Tack Sam? 

He was born in 1885. He ran away from Shangdung Province to join the circus. He was an acrobat. A magician. A comic. An impresario. A restaurateur. A theater owner. A world traveler. An East-West ambassador. A mentor to Orson Welles. He was considered the greatest act in the history of vaudeville. 

In this gorgeous graphic memoir, his great-granddaughter, the artist and filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, resurrects his fascinating life for the rest of the world. It's an exhilarating testament to a forgotten man. And every picture is true.

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. 

Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

Futures From Nature edited by Henry Gee

Are aliens really not interested in us at all? Is there a significant health benefit from drinking your own urine? Is loading your personality into a computer the best way to survive the death of the body? Is the death of the body really necessary? Here are a very large number of very small fictions on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SF writers in the world. 

Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred-word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future. These pieces were originally published in the great science journal Nature between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features that proved very popular with readers. This is a unique book, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

The Exception to the Rulers:  Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman
No description on Amazon and I'm too lazy to copy it from the book.


Any of these sound interesting to you?  And what have you received/bought/etc. lately?

No need to say anything about this. Just watch:
You can find Strieber's book on Amazon, in case you're interested. I'm sure it'll be an amusing read.

P.S.:  I don't know if the book will be available elsewhere in the future; it didn't show up in my B&N search, though.

which will seem suspiciously familiar to Americans who know a little about the United States' history with the Native Americans.
Walking with the Comrades is a quick read, though by no means an easy one.  Roy spends considerable time setting the stage for her walk with the Maoist "revolutionaries" in the forests of India.  She provides cogent analyses of the Indian government's old and new programs for stifling dissent, the language they use, and the results of their activities.  Likewise, she explores the history of communism in India, leading us through suppression, violent acts, revolts, and the mindset of the people on the ground -- the very comrades with which she walks.  Walking with the Comrades, as such, is part of the grand tradition of travel narratives, but it is also an expansion of Roy's long and distinguished career as a novelist and cultural critic.

And it's the travel narrative aspect which is most compelling.  True, Walking with the Comrades is about the political and economic situation in contemporary India, but it also an attempt to put a face on the great "security threat" of India.  It's a clever tactic, because understanding that there are humans behind the mask of terror forces us to think about who we are fighting against, and why they are resisting.  In the case of India, the Maoists are fighting a government that wants communism in all its forms destroyed, and the indigenous people protected by Maoists -- even if only for political gain -- moved off and adapted for industrial society -- at the expense of their traditions, native lands, etc.  To realize who the Maoists are is to make blind faith to India's new cultural projects impossible, if not because we care about the Maoists and their goals -- most of us in the U.S. likely do not because we have a tendency to be ruthlessly anti-communist here -- then at least because we understand why they are doing what they do.  Perhaps it's the optimist in me thinks that maybe reasonable compromise can be found in this cesspool of violence and hatred if only we can see the humanity in everything.

Still, some might be willing to dismiss Roy's work simply because she often provides polemics and doesn't seem altogether genuine when she concedes points to the opposition; in the case of Walking with the Comrades, Roy occasionally tries to suggest that the Indian government might have a solid rationale for some of their actions, yet the overwhelming majority of the book rips India to shreds, thereby weakening the conciliatory gesture.  But to dismiss the book for this reason would be to discount what is clearly a problem that transcends borders and exposes the divisions and strategies utilized by a government bent not on compromises with indigenous people, but the destruction of their way of life.  Even if you shrug Roy off as a wacky liberal, the facts point to a disturbing history which does not paint a pretty image for the Indian state.  And even if you look at the other side, it's hard to ignore the words spoken by the people in charge, the projects set in place, the militarization of the police, and the general sense that things are not as they should be.

It's perhaps for that reason that I come out of Roy's book feeling unable to challenge the anger and disbelief she channels throughout her book, despite wearing my critical thinking cap during the reading process.  Roy doesn't pull many punches when she attacks India's government and the corporations attached to it, but I found myself wondering why she bothered pulling the ones she did.  If her facts are in order -- they are -- then what the Indian government is doing doesn't deserve conciliatory gestures, friendly discussion, or calm reasoning.  Rather, it seems to me that to fight an extremist state, one must attack it with an extreme position. Roy certainly heads in that direction, and the result is an enormously educational reading experience.  When I finished reading, I wondered where we are supposed to go from here.  Maybe Roy will cover that in her next book...

Walking with the Comrades is one of the most compelling non-fiction books I have read this year, and certainly one worth remembering for years to come.  If you're interested in contemporary Indian history or global capitalism, this is a book to add to your collection.

If you want to learn more about the author, check out her Wiki page.  You can also find more information about the book on the publisher's website.  The book should be available pretty much anywhere.

Read With:
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper


(This feature will only be included on reviews of non-fiction books.  It's intended to offer a suggestion or two for SF/F books that might be interesting to read alongside the book being reviewed.)

I don't remember much about 1978; I was only in fifth grade. Much of what I do remember is spotty, like the fact that our TV set was a bulky piece of oak furniture with a bulbous gray screen in the middle. Back then, there were no remote controls, no cable or satellite television, and we got exactly three channels. We selected among them by turning a big silver dial on the front of the set, just above the shiny, gold fabric speaker covers. My dad always made one of the kids get up to turn the dial when he wanted to look for a different show. I remember other things from that long ago year, too. Like rotary-dial telephones, bell-bottom jeans (they always got caught in my bike chain), disco music, and my fifth grade library period with Mrs. Smith.

I really wasn't much of a student in those years, and, sadly, I made frequent trips to the principal's office. In 1978, there were few concerns about protecting a child's privacy. Whenever one's name was called for a trip to the office, the announcement came over the school's antiquated intercom system, and to the sadistic delight of virtually every child in the building. Those of us unlucky enough to have drawn the principal's ire were always called directly by name, for all to bear witness. These were somber affairs (I recognize it now as an effective form of intimidation). I remember these instances as utterly terrifying because, back then, a call to the principal's office meant only one thing: swats. And I must have gotten more than any kid in the whole school. I was such an unruly kid, in fact, that no one could ever figure out how Mrs. Smith, our withered, osteoporotic library teacher, always kept me so thoroughly leashed.

Mrs. Smith had curly, snow-white hair, pointy silver-rimmed spectacles, and shuffled along with a wooden cane. For a grade school librarian of the 1970's, she was straight out of central casting. She wore a different color polyester pantsuit every day of the week, and she rarely uttered a kind word. The walls of her library (which also doubled as the school cafeteria) were lined with children's books from ceiling to floor. Our job was to peruse the titles, choose one quickly, then shut up and read for an hour. For many of the children in my class, this was the longest, most miserable period of the day. For me, it was wonderful. The truth is that Mrs. Smith never had to say a word to me. I could've sat at that formica-covered table reading all day. 

Many, many golden nuggets lay hidden among the collection of dusty spines on those public school shelves: Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys, and Johnny Tremaine are among the titles I remember consuming that year. But these were not destined to stay with me like another I spotted one rainy afternoon. Though I found the title and cover of this new discovery quite strange, it intrigued me. Soon, I found myself mesmerized by a book that I would read over and over throughout the years of my life, and one that I remain fond of more than three decades later. It was called The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, and it was the best introduction to the modern fantasy genre that a rambunctious, imaginative kid could ever hope for. For weeks, my mind danced with thoughts of fawns, Turkish delight, talking beavers, and creatures turned to stone by an evil white witch. A few years later, following the suggestion of a friend, I picked up a copy of the strange cousin to that Narnia tale, and began a new love affair with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. These are the books that shaped my impression of what a fantasy story should be. Quite a high watermark. Over the years, I strayed from these tales, experimenting with new authors and genres. I even tried to recapture some of the magic by reading countless other fantasy tales (many of which I now regard as knock-offs). But like any true love, my heart always led back to Narnia and Middle Earth.

Somewhere in the middle of all this -- perhaps around the age of twelve -- I decided the course my life would take. I was going to be a writer. I wrote my first story in junior high, completing most of it during my English class while the other, more disciplined students fastidiously worked on whatever assignment the teacher had given that day. My debut story was about an old woman who captures the boy living next door to her, locks him in a pit, terrifies him, and later reveals that his whole life has been a sham, and that she is his real mother. I've no doubt that the story was just awful, but for me, it seemed somehow powerful. I wanted to get really good at the writing thing and give it a shot.

In time, perhaps thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. I turned out to be a capable student, after all, and eventually followed a long path that led me to medical school, and then into cardiology. Even so, I never abandoned the notion that someday I would write. When the time for me came, it was with those impactful memories of Narnia and Middle Earth still swirling in my head, and with hopes that I could create something wonderful, but not just another knock-off of those great writers of yore. This is how Antiquitas Lost was born. Please understand that I have no illusions of greatness. For a variety of reasons, the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien will not be -- cannot be -- duplicated. And I really am no different than thousands of other fantasy writers who have aspired to create something as big as those novels were. I realize this very well. I only hope that, if you have the opportunity to make your way into Pangrelor (the fantasy world in Antiquitas Lost), you might find some escape from the stresses of life, enjoy meeting the fresh cast of characters, and experience a fraction of the magic that I first experienced back in 1978.

Robert Louis Smith, author of Antiquitas Lost: The Last of the Shamalans, has numerous degrees, including psychology (B.A.), applied microbiology (B.S.), anaerobic microbiology (M.Sc.), and a Medical Doctorate (M.D.). He serves as an interventional cardiologist at the Oklahoma Heart Institute. He is married and the father of two young children. He began writing Antiquitas Lost in 2003 while studying at Tulane University in New Orleans.

For more information please visit http://www.antiquitaslost.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

I'll let the description on the episode page do the talking:

Our last non-interview, non-torture episode of the year is all about our favorite books, movies, TV shows, interviews, etc. for the 2011 year.  You can see our lists below, but you'll want to listen to hear our reasons. 

Plus:  we spend a little time saying thank you to everyone who listened and appeared on the show.  Why?  Because we love you.  Obviously.  Show us a little love back by leaving a response to the following questions: 

What books, movies, and TV shows were your favorites for 2011 (whether published this year or not)?  Which interviews, roundtables, and Torture Media episodes did you most enjoy? 

Head on over and take a listen!

 

Another edition of things I've added to my collection.  Some of these are research selections, as I bought them around the same time when I was putting together a syllabus on postcolonial fiction.  As such, the books below are an eclectic bunch.

What I want to know is:

What have you purchased recently?
Which books below most interest you?

Here's the list:
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdey (Penguin)

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. 

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight’s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

Galactic Cluster by James Blish (Signet)

Imagine...a galaxy of superworms bound together through telepathy...and a planet whose inhabitants consider the human brain to be a cancerous tumor! 

Imagine...an incredible journey to Alpha Centauri that takes ten months for a man's body--and 6,000 years for his mind! 

Imagine...the refugees of the ultimate germ war cowering beneath the crust of the planet.  To remian in hiding means mass psychosis--but to flee to the surface is certain death! 

James Blish has imagined all this...and has created from it a universe that is both fantastic and horrifyingly real.  Here is modern science fiction...by one of the acknowledged masters of our time!

The King's Rifle by Biyi Bandele (Amistad)

It's winter 1944 and the Second World War is entering its most crucial state. A few months ago fourteen-year-old Ali Banana was a blacksmith's apprentice in his rural hometown in West Africa; now he's trekking through the Burmese jungle. Led by the unforgettably charismatic Sergeant Damisa, the unit has been given orders to go behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. But Japanese snipers lurk behind every tree—and even if the unit manages to escape, infection and disease lie in wait. Homesick and weary, the men of D-Section Thunder Brigade refuse to give up. 

Taut and immediate, The King's Rifle is the first novel to depict the experiences of black African soldiers in the Second World War. This is a story of real life battles, of the men who made the legend of the Chindits, the unconventional, quick-strike division of the British Army in India. Brilliantly executed, this vividly realized account details the madness, sacrifice, and dark humor of that war's most vicious battleground. It is also the moving story of a boy trying to live long enough to become a man.

Was by Geoff Ryman (Penguin)

This haunting, wildly original novel explores the lives of several characters entwined by The Wizard of Oz--both the novel written by L. Frank Baum and the strangely resonant 1939 film. Was traverses the American landscape to reveal how the human imagination transcends the bleakest circumstance.

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson (Vintage Contemporaries)(the image is from a different edition)

Hailed by the New York Times as "wildly ambitious" and "the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, 'The Wasteland,' Fahrenheit 451, and Dog Soldiers, screened Star Wars and Apocalypse Now several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones," Fiskadoro is a stunning novel of an all-too-possible tomorrow. Deeply moving and provacative, Fiskadoro brilliantly presents the sweeping and heartbreaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to breaking tale of the survivors of a devastating nuclear war and their attempts to salvage remnants of the old world and rebuild their culture.

The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess (Penguin)

The dying Freud hustled out of Vienna into exile.  A Broadway musical on the subject of Trotsky in New York.  The last throes of the planet of Earth in AD 2000.  These are all items on The End of the World New. 

Psychoanalysis, international socialism and The End--three themes, three stories--outrageously counterpointed into trinity, in a novel stuffed with verbal pyrotechnics, amazing sleights of fantasy, and tantalizing jokes, and which is crowned by a brilliant, unexpected, out-of-this-world finale--all written by one novelist at the height of his powers.

Here Comes Another Lesson by Stephen O'Connor (Free Press)

STEPHEN O’CONNOR IS ONE OF TODAY’S MOST GIFTED AND ORIGINAL WRITERS. In Here Comes Another Lesson, O’Connor, whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, and many other places, fearlessly depicts a world that no longer quite makes sense. Ranging from the wildly inventive to the vividly realistic, these brilliant stories offer tender portraits of idealists who cannot live according to their own ideals and of lovers baffled by the realities of love. 

The story lines are unforgettable: A son is followed home from work by his dead father. God instructs a professor of atheism to disseminate updated Commandments. The Minotaur is awakened to his own humanity by the computer-game-playing "new girl" who has been brought to him for supper. A recently returned veteran longs for the utterly ordinary life he led as a husband and father before being sent to Iraq. An ornithologist, forewarned by a cormorant of the exact minute of his death, struggles to remain alert to beauty and joy. 

As playful as it is lyrical, Here Comes Another Lesson celebrates human hopefulness and laments a sane and gentle world that cannot exist.

Starship by Brian Aldiss (Signet)

They were humans--or so they believed--the grotesque result of a grandiose experiment which had gone appallingly awry. 

Trapped on a world that was hurtling through space at a fantastic speed, they sought the riddle of their heritage among the only companions they knew--ghosts, mutants, giants and regimented rats. 

This is one of the most extraordinary novels ever written, the spine-tingling story of lost beings who try to find themselves in a world gone made.

The Battle of Foreve by A. E. Van Vogt (Ace)

Humanity, true humanity, had reached its Utopian ideal in the select colony of the perfect thousand--isolated from the crude world around them which they had populated with pseudo-men created biologically from the various beast species.  The thousand men and women were free to dream, to philosophize, to enjoy the flowers of the mind--but not of the body. 

Then Modyun, the restless one, decided to visit the outer world and thereby precipitated the Battle of Forever.  For what he found were worlds within worlds, wheels within wheels, and a deus ex machina which hinted to outer-space origins. 

It's a new van Vogt universe-spanning epic, and it's gripping science fiction all the way!

When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (Warner Books)

A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.  

A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time. This Bison Frontiers of Imagination edition features the original story and its sequel, After Worlds Collide. 

We're back with another roundtable discussion!  Here's the description:

Fantasy author Paul Genesse joins us for a lively discussion about darkness and nihilism in science fiction and fantasy. We cover everything from the good vs. evil dichotomy, war, Game of Thrones, Steven Pinker, and much more! 

Plus, Paul tells us a bit about his upcoming novel, the Crimson Pact series, and his deepest…darkest…secrets! Only two of those things are true…

Download the episode and enjoy!

It's been a while for a Haul of Books feature, which means it's time for catching up!  And that's what this post is all about.

What I want to know is:

What have you purchased recently?
Which books below most interest you?

Here's the list:
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan (Little, Brown)

Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.  

A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family’s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle’s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees—a microcosm of today’s Africa—a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.  

Uwem Akpan’s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Harcourt)

At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter . . . 

Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. 

But in the wake of september 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Washington Square Press)

Award-winning screenwriter Malla Nunn delivers a stunning and darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid South Africa, featuring Detective Emmanuel Cooper -- a man caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the raw hunger for power make life very dangerous indeed. 

In a morally complex tale rich with authenticity, Nunn takes readers to Jacob's Rest, a tiny town on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. It is 1952, and new apartheid laws have recently gone into effect, dividing a nation into black and white while supposedly healing the political rifts between the Afrikaners and the English. Tensions simmer as the fault line between the oppressed and the oppressors cuts deeper, but it's not until an Afrikaner police officer is found dead that emotions more dangerous than anyone thought possible boil to the surface. 

When Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman, begins investigating the murder, his mission is preempted by the powerful police Security Branch, who are dedicated to their campaign to flush out black communist radicals. But Detective Cooper isn't interested in political expediency and has never been one for making friends. He may be modest, but he radiates intelligence and certainly won't be getting on his knees before those in power. Instead, he strikes out on his own, following a trail of clues that lead him to uncover a shocking forbidden love and the imperfect life of Captain Pretorius, a man whose relationships with the black and coloured residents of the town he ruled were more complicated and more human than anyone could have imagined. 

The first in her Detective Emmanuel Cooper series, A Beautiful Place to Die marks the debut of a talented writer who reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene. It is a tale of murder, passion, corruption, and the corrosive double standard that defined an apartheid nation.

Modem Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock (PM Press)

Jerry Cornelius—Michael Moorcock’s fictional audacious assassin, rockstar, chronospy, and possible Messiah—is featured in the first of two stories in this fifth installment of the Outspoken Author series. Previously unpublished, the first story is an odyssey through time from London in the 1960s to America during the years following Barack Obama's presidency. The second piece is a political, confrontational, comical, nonfiction tale in the style of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell. An interview with the author rounds out this biting, satirical, sci-fi collection.

44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus)

Welcome to 44 Scotland Street, home to some of Edinburgh's most colorful characters. There's Pat, a twenty-year-old who has recently moved into a flat with Bruce, an athletic young man with a keen awareness of his own appearance. Their neighbor, Domenica, is an eccentric and insightful widow. In the flat below are Irene and her appealing son Bertie, who is the victim of his mother’s desire for him to learn the saxophone and italian–all at the tender age of five. 

Love triangles, a lost painting, intriguing new friends, and an encounter with a famous Scottish crime writer are just a few of the ingredients that add to this delightful and witty portrait of Edinburgh society, which was first published as a serial in The Scotsman newspaper.

The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Anchor Books)

Meet Mma Ramotswe, the endearing, engaging, simply irresistible proprietress of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the first and only detective agency in Botswana. With persistent observation, gentle intuition, and a keen desire to help people with the problems of their lives, she solves mysteries great and small for friends and strangers alike.

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (Grove Press)

From the author of MASTER AND MARGARITA, BLACK SNOW and DIABOLIAD, a novel which features a Moscow professor who befriends a stray dog and transplants into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man, unleashing a human dog which turns the professor's life into a nightmare beyond endurance.

Eyes of the Calculor by Sean McMullen (Tor)

Imagine a glittering, dynamic, and exotic Earth two thousand years in the future, where librarians fight duels to settle disputes, there is no electricity, fuelled engines are banned by every major religion in Australia, humanity has split into two species, and intelligent cetezoids rule the oceans. Fundamentally, unexpectedly, things are changing everywhere. As catastrophe looms and civilization begins to crumble, the Dragon Librarians have just one means left to hold their world together: to kidnap every numerate person on the continent and rebuild their out-of-date human-powered computer-the Calculor.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner)

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie. 

The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.

And the winners for the first two books in the series are:

Kevin and shadowflame1974.

The winner for the full trilogy is:

booksandboston!

Congratulations to everyone!  You should get an email from me shortly for your addresses.

Edit:  Kevin needs to contact me because I have no email address for him.  arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com.  Thanks!

The question becomes:  Who can play the narrative game with cunning and skill, and who will flounder in a sea of their own artistic deficiencies?
Crack'd Pot Trail does two interesting things:

1. It draws upon a rich history of larger narratives told through artists weaving miniature tales. 
2. It provides a meant-to-be-humorous, if not disturbing, scenario involving cannibalism and artists.

Suffice it to say she was the first to set out from the Gates of Nowhere and her manservant Mister Must Ambertroshin, seated on the high bench of the carriage, his face shielded by a broad woven hat, uttered his welcome to the other travelers with a thick-volumed nod, and in this generous instant the conveyance and the old woman presumed within it became an island on wheels round which the others clustered like shrikes and gulls, for as everyone knows, no island truly stays in one place (16).

Apto rubbed at his face as if needing to convince himself that this was not a fevered nightmare (as might haunt all professional critics), and I do imagine that, given the option, he would have fled into the wastes at the first opportunity, not that such an opportunity was forthcoming given Steck Marynd and his perpetually cocked crossbow which even now rested lightly on his lap (he'd done with his pacing by this time) (41).

Is there anything more fraught than family?  We do not choose our kin, after all, and even by marriage one finds oneself saddled with a whole gaggle of relations, all gathered to witness the fresh mixing of blood and, if of proper spirit, get appalingly drunk, sufficient to ruin the entire proceedings and to be known thereafter in infamy.  For myself, I have always considered this gesture, offered to countless relations on their big day, to be nothing more than protracted revenge, and have of course personally partaken of it many times.  Closer to home, as it were, why, every new wife simply adds to the wild, unwieldy clan.  The excitement never ends! (150)

I've been thinking a lot recently about the issue of nihilism/darkness in genre fiction.  This post will come off as a kind of random exploration of things swimming around in my head.

Some seem to think that we live in a world that is far more nihilistic and dark than any other moment in the past.  To some extent, that might be true, particularly if you pick and choose which years you use to make the comparison.  But reality doesn't hold up well to pick-and-choose methods.  While the present is certainly beset with death, destruction, and violent rhetoric, the same could be said of almost every other moment in our history.  The difference, perhaps, has to do with where those elements are directed.

(Note:  by nihilism, I am referring to the form I think most imagine when they say "nihilism."  That is that morality is not innate to human beings, but a product of our cultural constructions.  In other words, morality is artificial, not natural.  There are plenty of other camps of nihilism, but I make the assumption that people who name "nihilism" do so with morality in mind.)

The 50s are often cited as the best years in America by cultural purists; but to make that argument, you have to ignore the rampant levels of sexism and racism, which permeated every level of contemporary 50s culture.  Toss in a few wars, famines, McCarthyism, and other disturbing events and you end up with an era which looks nice for a select cast of individuals living in a select group of nations.  (I make the assumption that few would say the 20s, 30s, and 40s were
amazing years for everyone, what with the aftereffects of WWI, the Great Depression, WW2, and so on).

If we move to the 60s, what we end up with is an era that, once more, doesn't look that great.  The Civil Rights Movement was important, but the era was home to some of the worst violent rhetoric we have ever seen, directed at one group of people for pointless reasons.  Then you had the Vietnam Conflict, which bled into the 70s, and numerous other problems the world over.  And let's not forget the Apartheid government of South Africa, who were playing the racism game in a way that would make the 50s and 60s in America look like a picnic.

The point is that there are always wars and conflicts.  There are always battles of ideology.  There is always suffering.  But ultimately, the world gets slightly better every decade.  Usually.  There are fewer conflicts today than ever before, even if America is losing its bloody mind and tearing itself apart from the inside (a product of intolerant people driven by intolerant ideology who refuse to admit to their intolerant nature).  We may be in a bit of a rut right now, but we're all human beings...and we always come out on top.  Eventually.  We're notoriously good at survival and progress, even if we're slow as molasses at it.

These developments show something unique about the human species:  that our moral frameworks change and adjust over time.  Men thought it moral to deny women basic American rights, but eventually changed their tune (for the most part).  Whites saw blacks as inferior and wanted to exclude them from white culture, but good people rose up and fought against that racist ideology, leaving us a better world (though racism still exists).  And now the tide of public opinion is changing in favor to gays and lesbians; the push against them stems from a kind of re-imagined racist ideology as anti-contamination narrative driven primarily through narrow-minded and contaminating religious interpretation.  A mouthful, for sure.

But things are getting better, and the people who don't see it are either too focused on this single moment of terror or on their own ideological view of the world, in which change constitutes wickedness.

What does all of this have to do with genre fiction?

A few have talked about the nihilistic feel of fantasy and science fiction in recent decades.  The good and evil dichotomies, we are told, have disappeared, or been complicated by the dismembering of moral objectivism/naturalism (i.e., through moral nihilism and relativism).  Similarly, we are told that because fiction is a reflection of our time, genre fiction is unreasonably dark.

But I don't buy into either of these ideas.  There have always been optimistic genre stories with clearly-defined sides of good and evil.  True, many of those stories are found on our TV or movie screens instead of on our pages (depending on what you read), but the idea that nihilism, in its moral form, and fiction-as-reflection-of-the-present have done something negative for literature or society seems specious.  When we break down the moral boundaries of our ideologies and start to look at how people are shaped by culture, I think we start to come out of the darkness of ideological purity.  That is that we come to understand one another as members of the same species.

Our fiction, I think, reflects this process of developmental understanding more so than it reflects the results (in its intentions, insofar as those can be determined).  I wouldn't be surprised, for example, to see stories in our near future dealing with allegories of the current forms of racism (the West vs. the Middle East).  And those explorations will run the gamut of types:  propaganda for, propaganda against, and deep exploration of both sides.  And reading fiction that deals with these issues helps train us.

Those kinds of explorations are good for us.  We need them in order to progress.  Because our literature and our films are gateways to developing a better world, to making us think about where we are and where we really ought to be -- in the pragmatic utopianism sense.  Genre fiction is a part of that process.  A great and glorious process of change.  I'd even argue that the nature of good and evil in fiction for young people, and its slow erosion, especially in genre fiction, is an unintentional training system -- one which acts as a gateway into the less pure views of the world, which does for the young what all that stuffy adult literature does for the old.

That doesn't mean we don't need stories about good and evil in their purest forms.  Such stories serve a purpose.  They let us escape in the best possible way from the tiring process of moral development.  They let us unload our tensions onto imaginary bad people who don't deserve our sympathy.  In other words, genre fiction which presents ideologically pure moral frameworks is cathartic.  But we have to come back to reality eventually, for ourselves and for those around us.

And that's where I'll leave things.  The comments are open.  Feel free to contribute.

-------------------------------------------------

Note:  to be fair, I am mixing up all kinds of philosophical ideas here.  Feel free to correct me.