Category Archives: Articles

 

  • Birdbrain: Sam Jordison has birds on the brain.

  • Leiji Matsumoto: Yamato Spirit: The artist of Space Battleship Yamato talks to Jonathan Clements and Motoko Tamamuro about his life and work.

  • Fantasy Without Cooties: In last issue’s Salon podcast we discussed how some fantasy novels are deliberately targeted at either male or female readers. That appears to be a commercial reality, whether we approve of it or not. But the fact that it happens appears to give rise to another, less supportable phenomenon. There is a fair amount of evidence that many male readers will not try a book by a female writer because they assume that books written by women are written for women.

  • In The Skin of a Lion: Sam Jordison finds a sense of wonder in Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion.

  • Somewhere in Time: Jonathan Clements on the many faces of Japanese science fiction author Yasutaka Tsutsui.

  • Better Living Through Software: Cheryl Morgan finds recent science fiction releases share a common interest in the man-machine interface.

  • Real Gone: Jonathan Clements traces the origins of Takeshi Koike’s Redline back into 1960s baseball, 1970s sci-fi racing and 1980s cheese…

  • Short Fiction: October 2010: The wide variety of metaphor and symbolism available in speculative fiction allows authors to tackle a bewildering variety of topics. One of the most disturbing issues that authors can wrestle with is child abuse. This month I present three recent stories that broach the subject using entirely different sets of tropes: historical slipstream, near future SF, and secondary world fantasy.

  • What Do We Mean By YA?: In any hierarchy each oppressed group is always looking for someone else to look down upon. Science fiction and fantasy occupy a pretty lowly place on the greasy totem pole of literary respectability. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that, when last year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel shortlisted three books marketed as “Young Adult”, a few eyebrows were raised around the blogosphere.

  • Notes on The Waterworks: There's a famous story that in 1899 Charles H Duell resigned from the US patent office and recommended that it be closed on the basis that "everything has already been invented". It isn't true.

  • The Dream Master: Satoshi Kon, who died on 23rd August, was a manga artist and anime director who brought a truly mature perspective to the Japanese animation medium.

  • Writing in the Real World: Cheryl Morgan is Salon Futura’s editor. She will be writing mainly about recent novel releases.

  • Short Fiction: September 2010: Karen Burnham will be bringing us news of the best of recent short fiction releases, concentrating primarily on stories that are online where you can go and read them immediately.

  • Fire in the Stone: Jonathan McCalmont reviews Nicholas Ruddick’s The Fire in The Stone - Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)