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To wrap up #ScifiMonth, I thought I'd search around for an artist that does sci-fi inspired art—and voila! Today's feature is: Pascal Blanché and his rusty, dusty, vermillion and chartreuse beings ...
A selection of my favorite pieces from Pascal Blanché‘s science-fiction inspired art!
Just watched the pilot episode of ‘The Expanse’. Trailer here: Mmpf! That’s me trying not to release any spoilers about it :D Okay, I am under control. So, this is a new TV series coming out in Dec...
A new sci-fi TV series coming out this December 2015 on the syfy channel. It's hinting at a strong human-centered narrative that for the most part remains grounded in real science—and it's also got some of the grit and texture of Battlestar Galactica! I am SO ready for The Expanse!
Sci-fi Month lasts throughout November and is hosted by Rinn Reads. People post all sorts of wonderful things about science-fiction—movies, tv shows, novels, short stories, cartoons, games. It's gr...
Visually gorgeous, tightly told, fairytale sci-fi about AIs and what makes us human.
#Scifi #ExMachina #ScifiFilm #ScienceFiction #ArtificialIntelligence #AI
The Book Smugglers put together a list of speculative fiction books that feature strong heroines labeled as "monstrous" women.
Ooh, definitely going to make my way through this list. Lots of good ones, here... Looking forward to trying Nimona, The Fifth Season, and Of Sorrow and Such in particular!
@Novelicious tweets a motivational quote about the creative process of writing everyday, every other hour and her quotes are always accompanied by beautiful artwork or photography. I've hearted so ...
Whenever I’m struggling with lack of inspiration for my story, I search around for surreal art to fill those wells of my imagination. Hope week 1 of NaNo has been going well for all of you.
My complete 24-page comic-book adaptation of the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot (Click on images to enlarge).
Artist Julian Peters’ artistic rendition of the beautiful, haunting poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot. The artwork is a nuanced window into this classic poem of paralysis, languishing loneliness, and lost dreams. I love the scenes of our narrator pausing, uncertain, frozen, with his hand at the door knocker. Lovely weaving of a stream of consciousness poem into the visual.
Dreamstuffs translated to art by the artist Erin Kelso (or 'bluefooted' in the deviantart community). The artist has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology and a Master's in Zoology, squeezing in time to le...
Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances and Me
Garth Nix, author of Sabriel and the rest of the Abhorsen Chronicles, is a fantasy master. So obviously his next book is… a Regency romance?? Here’s Garth Nix himself to explain how he was inspired to write a romance novel with a twist of magic!
* * *
I was introduced to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances by a series of minor calamities when I was about twelve years old.
The first calamity was having to go away for six weeks on our family summer holiday to the beach, which did not begin as a calamity. It only turned into one because it rained for the entire six weeks. It rained and rained and rained. There was a flood that cut the road so we couldn’t even go into the small town half an hour’s drive away.
Then I got a cold which turned into bronchitis and I got quite sick, so sick I couldn’t even read for a few days. Which was possibly just as well because by that stage I had read every book in our house.
As I began to recover, I started reading the books we’d brought with us again. At this point a kind neighbor who owned a very large and historical property several miles up the road, invited me to visit and borrow books from her library.
Naturally, I was delighted, because she really did have a library in her large hilltop house overlooking broad acres, but especially because she had a pet cockatoo there that every now and then would say “What are you lookin’ at stupid?”
Waiting for the cockatoo to say something while reading on a lounge in an actual private library, with the rain beating down on the windows, was something close to heaven. I also got given cups of tea and lamingtons ( a kind of cake).
My benefactor had an entire shelf of Georgette Heyer Regency romances in hardcover, with the elegant Barbosa dustjackets.
They looked like straight historical novels to me, which is perhaps just as well, given I was a twelve year-old boy who might have been embarrassed to be seen reading something too obviously identified as romantic fiction. It took me quite a few more years before I overcame that foolish reflex and learned to brazenly read whatever I thought was interesting, no matter the cover or other people’s opinions.
Over the next several incredibly wet weeks, I read all the Heyer Regencies. Then I started again. Over the years since, I have read most of them at least a dozen times. Some are better than others, as is always the case with any author who has a long career.
In general I like the ones best where Heyer gives her humour a looser rein. Some of the novels are straighter than others, and consequently seem a little heavy compared to their light-hearted sisters.
All of them are adventure stories, to one degree or another. There are duels, and kidnappings, and overturned coaches, and stolen gold and highwaymen and false identities and lost heirs … and sure, romance.
Lots of different kinds of romance, from love at first sight to extremely reluctant love despite all intentions, to love the characters didn’t know they had until it was lost, to slowly-developing love born from what appeared to be mere convenience.
I have loved these books at twelve, and twenty, and thirty and forty and fifty. So much I wanted to write one myself, though of course being me I couldn’t help but have the fantastical intrude. Newt’s Emerald is the result. But it could never have been written if it hadn’t been for all that rain forty years ago, a countrywoman’s library and kindness to a sick boy, and of course, Georgette Heyer’s books.
Some of my favourite Heyers, in no particular order, are:
Friday’s Child. This is a kind of Cinderella story, with the marriage right at the beginning of the story, not at the end. Viscount Sheringham, piqued at being rejected by a beauty, decides to marry the first woman he sees, who turns out to be a childhood friend, the forlorn, badly-used ward of neighbours. They have no idea what they’re getting into with each other, Sheringham’s friends are hilarious upper-class idiots and it is both very funny and quite moving how they all grow up over the first six months or so of their very eventful married life.
Unknown Ajax. This at first seems to be a fish out of water tale, with an aged nobleman and his family having to accept a previously unknown heir of apparently very common upbringing, a “weaver’s brat” from Yorkshire. But not all is as it seems. There are brandy smugglers, and pistol wounds, and the man mountain hero is a delight, giving the noble family what they expect to see.
The Toll-Gate. This is a mystery and a thriller as well as a romance. It’s got a deserted toll-gate, a missing keeper, a frightened boy, blackguards, ruffians, a Bow Street Runner, hidden caves … and a bored former cavalry officer looking for adventure and finding it, along with an unexpected love affair.
Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle. This is one for every author who has ever drawn a little too much from life. The heroine is just such an author, who bases an unpleasant character in her book on a nobleman simply because of his alarming eyebrows. But when he becomes her suitor (not because he wants to, oh not at first), things get very complicated.
These are some of the best Heyers, in my opinion, but really they’re all good. Read them all and choose your own particular favourites! Maybe even let me know on twitter @garthnix
And of course, I hope you also enjoy Newt’s Emerald!
On her eighteenth birthday, Lady Truthful, nicknamed “Newt,” will inherit her family’s treasure: the Newington Emerald. A dazzling heart-shaped gem, the Emerald also bestows its wearer with magical powers.
When the Emerald disappears one stormy night, Newt sets off to recover it. Her plan entails dressing up as a man, mustache included, as no well-bred young lady should be seen out and about on her own. While in disguise, Newt encounters the handsome but shrewd Major Harnett, who volunteers to help find the missing Emerald under the assumption that she is a man. Once she and her unsuspecting ally are caught up in a dangerous adventure that includes an evil sorceress, Newt realizes that something else is afoot: the beating of her heart.
In Newt’s Emerald, the bestselling author of Sabriel, Garth Nix, takes a waggish approach to the forever popular Regency romance and presents a charmed world where everyone has something to hide.
