One of fantasy’s classics is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726-1727. Lemuel Gulliver visits the lands of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and others. In this section, Chapter Two, he reports from the flying island of Laputa.
This story is based in a world setting I’ve been working on for years. I have novels planned in that world, and this story would be relatively ancient history by the time the first novel starts.
“Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.”
Readers seeking grand sword-slinging adventures, blood-drenched epic battles, and a travelogue of exotic imaginary lands will be frustrated by N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. However, Readers seeking unpredictable, stimulating fiction should snap the novel up. It’s not just an uncommonly well-written fantasy that upends expectations and offers fascinating explorations of the nature of power (political, familial, cultural, national, racial, divine). The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is an award-worthy novel and Jemisin’s a new writer to take note of.
A five-legged toad sat against the side, staring at her with wide, bulging eyes. Five legs, the sign of Aheben, the Fifth. Daha recoiled.
To be published this October by Prime Books, this inaugural volume of the year’s best dark fantasy and horror features more than 500 pages of dark tales from some of today’s best-known writers of the fantastique as well as new talents. Chosen from a variety of sources by Bram Stoker and international Horror Guild award-winning editor Paula Guran, these stories are as eclectic and varied as the darkness itself.
It’s been very exciting—there’s a definite sense of people interacting with each other now, of a lot more openness. It’s telling that a lot of our visitors to the blog now are not from North America, but from mainland Europe and from Asia. People are bypassing the American SF scene to some extent, and talk to each other instead.
For the next few weeks, I’ll be running down top-ten lists of some of fantasy’s best fight scenes: the vast battles, one against impossible odds, the magnificently over-the-top. You know, sometimes a duel just isn’t enough to settle those really big differences. When there is no peaceable way out of an enormous conflict, it’s time to suit up, summon some armies, and have yourself a battle
S.T. Joshi notes in his anthology’s introduction that he solicited contributions based on H.P. Lovecraft’s statement: “All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.’’ The result is 21 stories that mostly pass Lovecraft’s “test of the really weird”—which also serves as this tome’s epigraph: “…whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”
It is called transference, of course it does, though of course it is not exactly that. Mrs. Pongboon has a device, yes she does, and what the device does, is copy—how clever, those Chinese across the border!—is copy-and-delete.
