Mapping Worlds in The Lost Gate
By Orson Scott Card
Sometimes you know when you’re onto something big. It was the same year that “Ender’s Game” appeared in Analog—my first sci-fi publication. I was working with Ben Bova, and the stories I was selling all had spaceships and rivets and machines. But in my heart, what I loved was fantasy.
No, let’s be more precise: What I loved was Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and George Macdonald’s The Light Princess and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead and Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and John Hersey’s White Lotus and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Crowley’s The Deep and Peake’s Ghormengast.
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Why Escape?
By Col Buchanan
Escapism is bad for you. It’s unhealthy and immature and leads to a lack of bathing.
I’m fairly certain you’ve come across this particular sentiment before, maybe not the bathing part, but the rest of it. Hell, maybe even the bathing part too. People who hold this viewpoint tend to look poorly upon the imagined realms of fantasy and SF – and even more so in regards to their fans. Yes – because we’d rather poke a stick at the human condition from the vantage of Mars or Westeros than from the kitchen sink, because we like to cast our imaginations as far as we can, because we like to go wow along the way, we’re all somehow squandering our precious time on this Earth.
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What Happens After You Save the World?
By Jo Walton
Among Others is a book about what happens after you’ve saved the world. What happens when you’re fifteen, and you thought you were going to die, and your sister did die, and the world is safe but nobody knows you did it.
It’s about going on from there, day after day, and going to school. It’s also a book about loving books, how reading can shape your mind and the way you approach the world. It’s about someone who obsessively reads science fiction, but who has fantasy problems and real world problems. It’s about the loneliness of being a bright kid with nobody to talk to about the things you care aboutƒand it’s about using magic to try to do something about that. And it’s set in a very specific place and time—South Wales and the Marches, between September 1979 and February 1980.
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