These days, when an intelligent and determined person like Greta Thunberg conveys the urgency of climate degradation and hopes to lead others to effect change, her actions and message defy societal limitations often imposed on people who manage their lives … Continue reading THE KITCHEN DAUGHTER
This season, full of turmoil and menace, as well as hope, reckoning, and the promise of regeneration, is also the fifth and third anniversary of my two novels, Malevir: Dragons Return and Where Dragons Follow (its stand-alone sequel). This post reviews the … Continue reading A Manual of Magic
Although the works are not analogous, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge reminds me of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. Both works survey and reveal the heart of a community and the relationships of its inhabitants. Strout experiments successfully with multiple … Continue reading Notes on “Olive Kitteridge”
Plenty of reviews favor Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel whose narrative kills off 99% of humanity in a contemporary 21st century setting. I picked it up to read in tandem with Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton. I can only note my response to the book [anxiety, chills, and wild thoughts] without formally reviewing it because I imagine that none of those reviews was written in the context of a nearly global viral epidemic, the fictional analog being Station Eleven’s device bringing about the end of the world as we know it. The story … Continue reading Notes on “Station Eleven”
“Where do you get your ideas? How did you ever dream up that character? I like your protagonist. When is the sequel coming out so I can see what happened to her?” Questions like these often dot conversations I have … Continue reading Latin Roots: Character Sources
I write more than fantasy fiction. Look for my short stories online: in After Hours (print), bewilderingstories.com, http://www.horrorseek.com/home/horror/darkfire/ficarch.html, http://www.fictitiousthejournal.org/, the Weird Reader, and the Fall Fantasy Anthology out of Cloaked Press in Autumn, 2017. Continue reading More than Dragons
Fantasy novels traditionally depict their giants as gross, dimwitted, and often malevolent creatures. My Dragonwolder giants behave quite differently. They have a mission. Here to explain is the rock giant, Enderfon, featured in Where Dragons Follow: Return of the Malevir. ENDERFON: I … Continue reading Enderfon, the Giant, Explains His Rocky Beginnings
[from https://theprotagonistspeaks.com Assaph Mehr’s site enabling this interview of Sweetnettle, one of my characters from the Dragonwolder series, Malevir: Dragons Return and Where Dragons Follow] Character Interview Questions Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it … Continue reading Interview with a Sprite
The power of magic, whether benign or evil, remains one of the strongest elements of fantasy fiction. My trilogy, the Dragonwolder fantasy series, relies on the good magic of its giants, wizards, and sprites to thwart the cruel intentions and … Continue reading The Power of Magic
Clifford D. Simak was an award-winning American science fiction writer, born in 1904 in Millville, Wisconsin. Setting a story like Time and Again (1951) in rural Wisconsin characterizes much of Simak’s fiction. For example, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Time and Again Simak imagines a University of North America, located a short distance from the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. Another pervasive theme in this novel and other Simak fiction is time travel, in his view rarely a good strategy for escaping contemporary woes. Asher Sutton, a human transformed by his deep-space planetary encounter with ‘symbiotic … Continue reading Reading Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak
Susan Bass Marcus Writes 
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