Author: Ruth Arnell

That’s it. It’s done. With the publication of a new version of the classic Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte sporting a cover to make it look like a Twilight novel, and a cover blurb proclaiming it to be Edward and Bella’s favorite book, I hereby declare Twilight dead. Or undead. I don’t care, it’s just over.

Fantasy has always been cyclical. I read an interview with Midori Snyder in which she said that she wrote the Oran trilogy (which you should all go read. Right now. I’m serious about that.) because at the time she came on the scene as a fantasy author,

Welcome to Thoughtful Thursday.  Like always, if you have a topic you want to see addressed, please contact us!

A recent discussion with some of the other reviewers on this site turned to a discussion of some of the horrible naming conventions that seem to plague fantasy.  For example, the idea that you can tell you’re reading  a fantasy novel if the protagonist’s name has three apostrophes and a random K and/or H in it. That started me thinking about clichés in fantasy in general.  So I’m throwing down the gauntlet to you,

This week I want to take on a more serious topic than normal.  September 26th starts Banned Books Week, an annual observance of the importance of the First Amendment to protect your freedom to read.  This is especially pertinent to fantasy readers because young adult fantasy novels are frequently challenged.  The J.K. Rowling Harry Potter books and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series are two of the most challenged books over the last decade.  If Fantasy Literature’s motto is “Life’s too short to read bad books” then for the next week, let it be “Life’s too short not to read bad books.”

Few things have filled my heart with as much dread as watching this video:

The thought that they were going to turn my beloved Where the Wild Things Are into a feature length movie scared me. How were they possibly going to capture the sense of wonder and magic that pervades the few short pages of the story and not completely destroy it by stretching it to over ninety minutes?

This is a problem that is regularly faced by readers: What do you do when a favorite book is mutated into something unrecognizable as it arrives at the local cinema?

Arthur C. Clarke has claimed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In a book about elves who use magic to create race cars, Mercedes Lackey wrote that “any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology,” quoting the author Larry Niven. Which leaves me with the question: is there really a difference between fantasy and science fiction? When it comes to a story, is there a fundamental difference between a spaceship with a teleporter device and a mage with a portal spell? What is the difference between an alien and an elf?

So readers,

This week for Thoughtful Thursday I am going to go to our reader mailbag for the topic. If you have a topic you would like to see addressed in this space, please contact us. Liam Nolosco asked how I felt about authors who pick up dead writers’ series. He referenced both Robert Jordan and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

When it comes to Robert Jordan, many years ago I was dating a young man who thought the Wheel of Time series was the best thing ever written. I read the first book and started the second,