“Petite, her silver hair shining, Le Guin shrugged and grinned when Neil Gaiman placed the medal around her neck,” described The New Yorker of Ursula K. Le Guin when she accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters presented by the National Book Awards on November 19, 2014. Le Guin might be petite in stature, perhaps, but her words in acceptance of the achievement were anything but small.
“Hard times are coming,” she said, her voice ringing out over an awed crowd. . “We’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”
Le Guin is a legendary figure in science fiction and fantasy, author of many classics, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Wizard of Earthsea, and a champion for literature’s place in the every changing landscape of modern society — a “realist of a larger reality” is there ever was one. Her acceptance speech rang through the SFF community and beyond, a tolling bell of optimism. Through her ongoing insistence to use fiction as a lens through which we examine ourselves, Le Guin, and writers like her — poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality — has continued to challenge speculative fiction to be a catalyst for positive change, a limitless medium that can offer hope to a world that obsesses over hopelessness. Read More »
So, it’s that time again. 2014 is in the rear-view mirror and we’re all puking nostalgia for the year gone by. Below is a list of some of my very favourite things from 2014.
This is very intentionally not a Hugo ballot (because who likes being strapped down by those rules if they don’t have to be), as I wanted some freedom to group things as I feel they should be grouped, and because I want to be able to celebrate stuff that I enjoyed immensely, but isn’t quite right for the Hugo Ballot (*coughFantasyLifecough*). My Hugo nominations will come later, but this should give you a hint of what’s to come.)
So, without further adieu, let’s jump into my favourite things of 2014!
My Favourite Novel
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
Who would have thought that Robert Jackson Bennett, author of quirky horror/urban fantasy mash-up novels, would write the best secondary world fantasy of the year? City of Stairs is an absolute delight from beginning to end. It’s a chain-smoking, edge-of-your-seat, snarl of a novel with a wonderfully grizzled cast. The broken city of Bulikov, decimated when its gods were killed, is one of the most tragic and fascinating examples of “setting as character,” and its an absolute joy to explore its mysteries as Shara and Sigurd (an odd couple that you can’t help but love) unravel its mysteries. To top it off, Bennett wraps things up with a conclusion so satisfying and epic that you can’t hardly believe the novel’s only 450 pages. Other authors only manage to fit half so much into novels twice as long.
Even as I was startled by its twisted depth, I adored every moment I spent with City of Stairs. Colonialism lies at the centre novel’s centre, and RJB handles it with equal parts boldness and delicacy. The ruined beauty of Bulikov and its fallen gods haunted me long after I turned the final page. Read More »
Back to the Future II (or, the best Back to the Future film) is set, mostly, in 2015. It’s full of hover boards, self-drying jackets, and self-tying shoes, and generally seems pretty damn awesome. Well, the film might have got a few things wrong in its projection of the psychedelic and futuristic society we now live in, but we can dare to dream about what the next decade will bring, right?
To celebrate the film trilogy, artist Andy Fairhurst has created “88 MPH”, a triptych of posters that beautifully illustrate the power of everyone’s favourite DeLorean. When you’re done drooling at “88 MPH”, the rest of Fairhurst’s DeviantArt gallery is full of beautiful custom illustrated movies posters.
A beautiful cover for what is sure to be one of the more mesmerizing short fiction collections released this year. China Mieville’s Three Moments of an Explosion is the latest collection from the author of Perdido Street Station and Embassytown. It’s due out on July 30th, 2015 from Tor Books UK.
“[Three Moments of an Explosion] is a wonderfully intelligent and engaging collection featuring stories with sentient oil rigs, flying icebergs and a ladder into space,” says the official announcement on the Tor UK blog. Mieville fans know exactly what to expect of the collection, which is to expect nothing at all.
When gamers think of Guild Wars 2, the concept art created by Kekai Kotaki and Richard Andersen (who are also two of the best fantasy/science fiction cover artists working today) comes blazingly to mind. It’s rich and unique, broad and diverse. I’ve never played a minute of Guild Wars 2, but the concept art is so wonderful that I’ve sought it out at every opportunity.
Kotaki is no longer with ArenaNet, so in comes Theo Prins, a new artist to work alongside Richard Andersen and the rest of the Guild Wars 2 art team as they continue to build one of the most vivid and beautiful worlds in gaming. Prins’ loose, impressionistic style fits perfectly alongside the art of Kotaki and Andersen, but he brings a pastel colour palette that those two artists don’t often utilize.
Prins “grew up in the Pacific Northwest and the Netherlands and spent most of his childhood drawing airplanes, cities and dinosaurs,” says his official biography. “As a teenager he financed flying lessons with aviation art commissions but dropped his idea of becoming a pilot when he discovered his passion for digital art.” More of his art can be found on his DeviantArt gallery and his official portfolio.
