Art of the Genre: Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
I guess my string of nostalgia continues here at the Black Gate L.A. offices. You see, it was ‘bring you son to work’ day last Friday and I decided even though it might come back to bite me, I’d expose my 5-year old son Ash to Ryan Harvey and Kandi. I figured if worse came to worse, I could just skip out and spend a few hours on the beach with him, but a few stars aligned and that wasn’t the case.
Luckily for me, unlucky for him, Ryan had left the office for the opening of Immortals, and Kandi took a personal day for a casting call in some new Roland Emmerich blockbuster so Ash and I sat in my office and had Starbucks as I tried to explain to him what it was I did exactly. The conversation quickly devolved into a justification for all things fantasy before he lost interest and asked if he could play Angry Birds on my iPhone.
This, for all you scoring at home, was a turning point for me. I had one of those ‘when I was a kid’ epiphanies. I mean really, when I was a kid there were no iPhones, heck we had a corded rotary phone in my house until the phone company demanded my mother remove it a decade ago, and that phone was even on a party line if anyone remembers what that is.
Yeah, I just turned the big 4-0 a couple of months back, and as I sat looking at my little pixie-faced boy with his Bieber hair and Quicksilver surfing attire I tried to remember what I was doing when I was getting ready to turn 6.
Well, I guess I was going to Star Wars, playing with action figures, enjoying platter meals at Burger Chef, and reenacting Smokey and the Bandit with my Hotwheels. In that year, 1977, the Atari 2600 would be released, but I’m sure I didn’t see it until I was 8 or 9, and probably didn’t own one until 1980 or 81. Yep, there were no video games for the first decade of my existence, but we somehow made due with our imagination.
Immortals (2011)
Young adult fiction has a lot going for it in recent years. In the wake of the Harry Potter craze, there’s an entire generation of young people who have grown up with the understanding that reading is a cool way to spend your time and entertain yourself.
Writing about Romanticism has gotten me started thinking about forms, and conventions, and how we read a story. To some extent I’ve come to feel that contemporary ways of reacting to narrative are more classical than romantic; they’re more to do with structure and form than with trusting the individual genius. It seems to me that many readers, and critics, have become used to looking for certain things in a story, and have come to think of stories that function in a different manner as necessarily defective rather than distinct. And I feel this is a pity, since if we can’t accept the strange works of genius that succeed in defiance of everything we think we know about storytelling, then our experience of story becomes diminished. 
The November issue of Clarkesworld is currently 
I still haven’t quite come to grips with The Hobbit in 3D. I’ve got a few 3D films under my belt—Avatar, Captain America, Green Lantern, and Jaws 3—and to be honest, the added dimension hasn’t done much for me. Avatar made the most of it with its rich images of Pandora; the other films felt like they were trying to capitalize on a fad (hey, look, there’s a shield coming at me!) in order to take in a few extra bucks at the gate.