May 23, 2017
Anyone ever read Don Quixote? I promise it isn’t all about tilting at windmills and going on impractical adventures. In fact, in the second half of the story Don Quixote reads the same story we just read. This is metafiction — when an author makes literary characters aware that they’re in a book and they are characters, not people; sometimes…
April 25, 2017
With DC’s Wonder Woman finally due to hit theaters on June 2 (after which I will formally change my bio), it’s just not possible to stop thinking of other characters that need their own silver screen treatments. Because come on already. Before I started reading Wonder Woman a few years ago, I was a die-hard Marvel girl. I grew up on…
March 28, 2017
Who doesn’t love a good time-traveling adventure? Although more serious time-travel stories — 12 Monkeys [the film], Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), the TV series Continuum (discussed in a prior post) or the film Primer — can break your brain (especially Primer!), time travel has enchanted audiences since H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in the…
February 28, 2017
I’m a sucker for series that only get short runs. I like ruminating about untapped potential, I suppose; the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens make great daydreaming material (and story fodder). Every so often there’s talk of reviving Firefly, Joss Whedon’s beloved 2002 space western series, whose fans often feel was given short shrift by FOX. Firefly’s first season was fourteen episodes…
January 24, 2017
In Celtic mythology, “thin places” are spots where this world and the Otherworld allow inhabitants to cross over. The most famous example is actually Halloween, followed by the tale of Tam Lin, and Cristina Rosetti’s classic poem “Goblin Market.” Halloween, or Samhain (pronounced SAH-ween), took place just after the harvest and was thought to be a time when the boundaries…
December 27, 2016
The Star Wars franchise is finally centralizing women in its storylines, as evidenced by last year’s The Force Awakens and this winter’s smash Rogue One. This got me thinking about all the SF/F television series I’ve enjoyed whose stories are driven by and/or created for women. In no particular order: Bionic Woman. Wonder Woman. Buffy. Haven. Agent Carter (RIP dear…
November 22, 2016
Stories about class struggle are not new. In fact, these plots have been around for a long time, and we’re familiar with most of them: the Matrix trilogy, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, Escape from New York, The Grapes of Wrath, The Outsiders, Jane Eyre, We, Equilibrium, almost any Philip K. Dick story, The Dispossessed, the Divergent series, even The…
October 25, 2016
It’s October! Always a good month to scare yourself silly (and other people if you can manage it without retaliation. Erm, not that I’m advocating being a bully or anything). If you’re like me, my family, my friends, our uncles, aunts, third cousins, and all the people we passed notes to in first grade, you’ve seen Stranger Things at least…
September 27, 2016
We have a little less than one month until October 23 and the premiere of The Walking Dead’s seventh season! I enjoyed the Alexandria arc, but the last few episodes of the sixth season felt like Rick, Michonne and the rest of the gang were being moved around like chess pieces. I wasn’t fond of the horrible cliffhanger, either. But…
August 23, 2016
Welcome to Chain Reaction! Introducing a monthly column that will showcase three titles that have a common thread, theme, or plot device. I’ll take one known quantity and introduce two more along the same lines — something that made me think of another title, and then another. They might be recent; they might have been around for awhile; they might…