Guest Post On SF Signal: “Making Epic Fantasy New—Do We Need To?”
Recently I mentioned that I was beavering away on a guest post around “Making Epic Fantasy New”—and now that post is “live” on SF Signal.
Here’s the opening salvo:
“Making Epic Fantasy New—Do We Need To?”
At the end of last year I sat down to write a post on “making epic fantasy new.” I had been seeing opinions for some time that was critical of epic, from the aspersion that the genre itself is ho-hum, to allegations that it is variously monocultural, reactionary and misogynist. I was also mindful that when The Heir of Night was released in the US my Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s Whatever addressed concerns around some contemporary epic fantasy – chiefly that issues of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were not only portrayed in absolute terms, but that affiliation to one or the other depended more on what color “hat” a protagonist wore, rather than focusing on his or her actual behavior.
Yet somehow, the “making epic fantasy new” post just wouldn’t come together …”
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Wanna know why—rock on over to SF Signal and check out the rest of the post, here. 😉
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And speaking of Guest Posts & also Guest Series, I was thrilled to be able to contribute a guest post to Mary Victoria’s “Place as Person” series earlier this week, here, but I have also been really enjoying reading the entire series so far, introduced here. There are a whole array of fascinating posts up now, so if you haven’t already been over and had a look, you really should do so. Hie thee there at once, I say—at once!
And in the case of both posts, please feel free to comment, discuss, argue, illustrate—it’s a great feeling when posts move beyond ‘broadcast’ to spark conversation as well. 🙂