m. c. de marco

Via twitter: Razib at Gene Expression digresses from gene expression to the question of religion and fantasy. He manages to dig up more Jewish fantasy writers than Michael Weingrad did for his article in the Jewish Review of Books, Why There Is No Jewish Narnia:

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion.

Via @sfwa and SFScope: Pyr has announced they’re slushing unagented fantasy doorstops—uh, novels.

Pyr is only reading unagented submissions in “the subgenres of epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy.” Their needs for horror, science fiction, and slipstream are being met by agented submissions, so they’re not opening up those subgenres to the great, unagented masses.

I mean, women writing fantasy. Via a mailing list: Doug Cohen announced a female-themed issue of Realms of Fantasy for August 2011. The deadline for chick-written content is November 15, 2010.

… submissions dealing with gender, sexism, and other areas important to feminist speculative literature are particularly welcome.

I was browsing the Writers of the Future blog for this quarter’s results (more Honorable mentions are up, but no finalists yet) and I came across some old contest advice: K.D. Wentworth’s top-five list of what not to do when entering the WotF contest. To summarize: grammatical errors, bad spelling, withholding information, tropes, and infodumps are bad; showing the sf/f content early on is good.

Via Walter Jon Williams: Tim Holman’s survey of fantasy book cover art shows that it’s been a bad year for unicorns and dwarves. The comments suggest some creative ways to restore balance to the Force, as it were.

Via a mailing list: SFScope reports that Realms of Fantasy will be shutting down after their April 2009 issue, apparently due to slow newsstand sales. With the recent news that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is cutting back to bimonthly publication, the market for short fantasy fiction is looking down.

I found the The Well-Bitten Hand via The End of Science Fiction, linked by SF Diplomat. Both articles put a stake through science fiction, a genre whose time has, apparently, gone. “The Well-Bitten Hand” discusses the shambling undead corpse of sci-fi, ten years dead by John Barnes’ account, as part of the general mortality of genres. He eulogizes:

And it is a genre that flourished among mostly English-speaking, mostly middle-class, mostly Caucasian readers from the late 20’s to the early 90’s of the last century — in other words, for about seventy years.

Being the heirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, we then strapped the dearly departed to a steel table in our laboratory, wired it up to the lightning rod, and waited for a storm to fill the genre with eerie, unnatural life. Our monster shambles on to this very day.