Pieces on Speculative Fiction

I came across very interesting post about how most blog exclusive reviewers want to be published in print venues. Jay Tomio asserts that online sources of opinion aren’t poorer shadows of print opinions. I agree with him on the principle, however, I’d have to argue that people who write for print media have better understanding of their venue. I refer to the factoid that many web writers actually have no understanding how to write for the web. Most reviews in the blogosphere are written using traditional pyramid model where conclusions are therefore at the bottom of the article. This is the reason why I rarely read online reviews.

A quick points to improve readability of reviews:

• Grade on the top of the review, if you give one
• Opinion first, reasons and basic stuff later.
• Use emphasis
• Use inverted pyramid

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In my opinion racial issues aren’t really discussed in fantasy and science fiction. I haven’t found many authors who are willing to tackle this task.
Tia Nevitt makes an excellent point in a recent post to her blog.

I don’t check the skin color of the author, but when I crack open the book I invariably find a novel about white characters. To be sure, most of these settings are like northern Europe, in a medieval world, where you would indeed expect there to be mostly white people. I have never read about a black elf (except the drow, which I don’t think really count).

I’ve been thinking this quite a bit and in addition to recent fantasy debudant David Anthony Durham I can’t think of any black speculative fiction Read the rest of this entry »