Even the Wall Street Journal is weighing in on “romantasy.” (Thanks to Kat for this link.)
Reactor shared a short story from Nisa Shawl’s Everfair universe.
“Fantasy science for the win.” Judith Tarr writes columns on various topics for Reactor, including movie reviews. Here is her slightly acerbic take on 13th Child.
For Harlan Ellison fans everywhere, File770 has published the Table of Contents for the upcoming anthology The Last Dangerous Visions.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, endorsed the Communist Party in the upcoming British elections, because she assumed they, like her, were anti-trans. The Communist Party said, “No, thank you,” to the endorsement and published a clarification about their stance on trans rights.
The New York Times shares graphic novel recommendations.
I was curious about caimans, so I looked them up and learned quite a bit. Now you will too. I think there are some caimans in Floria in the wild, which were brought there (probably not legally) as pets, but that may be just another Florida-tourist legend.
Nerds of the Feather talks to Samantha Mills about her Six Books.
Atlas Obscura, one of my go-to websites, suggests using writing to engage with nature. First of all, there’s good writing instruction here; secondly, might this be a fun thing to do with kids during summer?
Here’s one cool recipe for a hot summer night; rainbow veggie baguette. It looks like the site has lots of warm-weather recipes.
So, if the WSJ article is accurate, romantasy is just a heavy slather of pornographic, wish-fulfillment fantasy layered onto a standard (or substandard) adventure plot? And this is the new “big thing” in speculative fiction? That’s very disheartening. I wasn’t sure what distinguished it from the regular romance-tinged stories that have occupied at least 80% of the genre novel space over the last decade, but I guess this is saying that rather than the borderline soft porn stories, romantasy is the hard stuff. And popularized via Tik-Tok. Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say.