m. c. de marco

Via whump.com: Lois McMaster Bujold spoke about genre in her guest of honor speech at the World Science Fiction Convention earlier this month. Here are her one-word genre definitions:

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency.

Via SFScope: Jay Lake will be judging Apex’s Annual Halloween Contest. The word limit is 1,000 words, and submissions (by email) are already open. The theme is Election Horror.

Some thoughts on zombies and genre continue here from Zombies Ain’t So Bad. When last we left our shambling friends, they were a species of smallpox in the larger subgenre of apocalyptic fiction.

Via Universal Hub: Skulls in Brookline is a brief history of the winged death’s head as seen in Walnut Street Cemetery in Brookline.

The February issue of First Things includes a retrospective by Ross Douthat: “Stephen King’s American Apocalypse”.

A thousand potboilers have been bought, devoured, discarded, and pulped in the thirty years since Carrie was published, and only King, out of all his million-selling peers, has managed to maneuver his way out of the mass-market ghetto and into a kind of quasi-respectability.

Via a mailing list: The Washington Post reports on Plato’s Cream Pie and Other Horror Delicacies from the latest incarnation of Weird Tales.

WT’s April cover is a Morrill painting of a ghostly, hollow-eyed sorcerer clad in a black gown with a chain belt that holds two drooling skulls.