The Dragon Page "Cover to Cover"
Conversations with Authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Interview: Our guest today is acclaimed Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Samuel R. Delany.
He is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University, and his most recent book is the revised edition of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, published by Wesleyan Press.
Interview: This week, Mike, Summer and Mike talk with Lawrence Watt-Evans about The Turtle Moves!: Discworld’s Story Unauthorized, an “unauthorized” compendium of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, from BenBella Books.
Interview: Jason Eberl, editor of Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, joins us to talk about this new collection and some of the topics and issues explored by the contributors, actual philosophers and students of philosophy who were also either huge fans of the show, or curious about the depths.
Can studying Galactica draw people into studying philosophy and into a deeper examination of the human (and Cylon) condition? Check out the book!
Interview: Jane Espenson joins us to talk about the newest Firefly/Serenity collection, Serenity Found from BenBella Books. She tells us about editing a collection about a universe she’s so fond of and familiar with, and a lot about television writing, and a bit about the WGA strike.
Check out our “Slice of SciFi” interview with Jane
Interview: Mike Stackpole and Summer talk with Glenn Yeffeth of BenBella Books, and creator of the intriguing and entertaining Smart Pop Books collection. Glenn tells us how their pop culture series got it’s start, and how the interests of the fans and their passion for the topics they love guide BenBella’s choices of topics to publish a collection about. He also tells about how they find contributors to their varied collections, and how future technologies affect publishing and communications, and the working the international markets for certain fandoms.
Touted as a book of “Insights into the World of Warcraft“, The Battle for Azeroth: Adventure, Alliance and Addiction is more of a class guide and compendium of essays about the different aspects of Blizzard Entertainment’s smash hit game. Players and non-playing family and friends will likely find something of interest in this book.
I try to avoid reading books out of order, and while it usually wouldn’t matter in this case, my having read Five Seasons of Angel before this one brings a couple of things to mind… the foremost being that while editor Glenn Yeffeth obtained fewer essays for the Angel collection, he also seems to have obtained more highly engaging essays for the it than for the Buffy collection. While that may sound like a minor slam of the Buffy collection, it’s not… it’s a big time golf-clap salute.
You know that a pop culture staple has gone far beyond the normal range of fandom and reached saturation when serious academic studies relating to the psychology, philosophy, and morality of show and of its characters are being published.
To my knowledge, only Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with two academic conferences dedicated to it so far) and Godzilla fall into that category, but Buffy’s spinoff, Angel, should be right beside them.
