Linked Stories by Gina Isabel R.
Find me also at @RiffleComics, @RiffleHistory, and @RiffleWorldLit and their respective Tumblr blogs.
“If beauty and love do not suit the times, then you have to be beautiful and to love to spite the times!” - Mikhail Shishkin, Maidenhair
Q: Is there one story line or premise you hope you never see again? Or do you remain open minded?
A: I am totally open minded–isn’t that the most exciting thing about great fiction, that it can change your mind about a subject or genre you thought you’d never be interested in? I read sci fi and fantasy and I love literary fiction that combines those elements, but I wasn’t a big crime reader until Zoe Ferraris’s amazing debut Finding Nouf landed on my desk. She drew me in with her detailed depiction of life in Saudi Arabia and the character of Nayir–a man who never intended to become a detective but who ends up solving a crime. After that I started reading more mysteries.
- stories in which a milquetoast civilian government is depicted as the sole obstacle to either catching some depraved criminal or to an uncomplicated military victory
- stories in which the words “thou” or “thine” appear
- talking cats
- talking swords
- stories where the climax is dependent on the spilling of intestines
- stories where FTL travel is as easy as is it on television shows or movies
- time travel too
- stories that depend on some vestigial belief in Judeo-Christian mythology in order to be frightening (i.e., Cain and Abel are vampires, the End Times are a’ comin’, Communion wine turns to Christ’s literal blood and it’s HIV positive, Satan’s gonna getcha, etc.)
- stories about rapist-murderer-cannibals
- stories about young kids playing in some field and discovering ANYTHING. (a body, an alien craft, Excalibur, ANYTHING).
- stories about the stuff we all read in Scientific American three months ago
- stories where the Republicans, or Democrats, or Libertarians, or the Spartacist League, etc. take over the world and either save or ruin it
- your AD&D game
- “funny” stories that depend on, or even include, puns
- sexy vampires, wanton werewolves, or lusty pirates
- zombies or zombie-wannabes
- stories originally intended for someone’s upcoming theme anthology or issue
- stories where the protagonist is either widely despised or widely admired simply because he or she is just so smart and/or strange
- stories that take place within an artsy-fartsy bohemia as written by an author who has clearly never experienced one
- your trunk stories
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” (original quote from C.K. Chesterton preceding the novel Coraline) Here’s how to get enough cash to buy books. Click here! (via afilmandlitlover)
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power. When you think about the Dune novels — the original Dune novels start out as this Machiavellian fix-up — the battle between these houses — but they turn out to be a very troubling meditation on what it means to take over an entire civilization and set it on a certain path.
But there were other books that just were supremely important to me, where I was like, damn. Stuff was happening in these science fiction books that I wasn’t seeing anywhere. Whether it was the Dorsai series or Harry Harrison or the Death World novels, where they’re imprisoned in this nightmare world where it’s sort of like a Doom videogame on crack. There was all of this extreme stuff happening that resonated with a lot of the ideas and experiences and the historical shadows that have been cast from the Dominican Republic. I didn’t see mainstream, literary, realistic fiction talking about power, talking about dictatorship, talking about the consequences of breeding people, which of course is something that in the Caribbean is never far away.
