kids in space

From: still cool as...

"I write fiction for young people because I love the infinite imaginative space it offers. Children and young adults are incredibly open to the literature of the fantastic. So far this century, we've enjoyed stories about magic and wizards, vampires and werewolves, and post-apocalyptic dystopias. Yet the most fantastic subject of all remains unexplored territory: space.

     […] The prevailing wisdom in children's publishing is that space is a hard sell. Everyone is a little scared of it. No one knows why. I've discussed this with authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians; we all acknowledge that it's an anomaly.
     Some argue that space fiction tends to the kind of techno-fetishism that appeals only to older men. This seems to me a caricature of what space fiction can be. Others believe prose can never capture the majesty of space as powerfully as film. I think this is nonsense too. Words draw on each reader's personal stock of images, and can be as intensely evocative as pictures. Besides, children's literature has a rich tradition of illustration; it can use pictures as well as words if it wants to!"
— SF Sadi, The Guardian
Read more…

Hybridization

"[…] We are sitting at a coffee shop in Austin, Texas; I am asking [Robert Jackson] Bennett questions about his latest novel, American Elsewhere, which was featured on 'most highly anticipated' lists around the Internet at the end of 2012. He tells me that although Mr. Shivers was shelved under horror and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in that genre, the horror community disowned it. 'They were like "no, this is not horror. You’re wrong,’'' Bennett says. 'That’s always been kind of a struggle for me, in that the folks who really like my books are frequently not the genre hard-core people. It’s usually folks who read a wide variety of stuff, that tend to fall into mainstream. And a lot of the fantasy that I like isn’t hardcore fantasy — it’s stuff that mainstream, non-geek people would love to read just as much.' He sighs. 'But then again no one really knows what the hell they’re talking about when they talk about this stuff. It’s all made up.'

     If something is identifiable as 'genre fiction,' it should be easy to identify what genre it’s in. After all, to classify something as belonging to a genre is to say that it is part of an easily recognizable group formed around shared traits. Over the past forty years, genre-bending has become increasingly common, as mainstream and 'literary' authors lift plots and themes from fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror.

   In 1989, SF author Bruce Sterling invented the term 'slipstream' to describe fiction by mainstream authors such as Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and J.M. Coetzee that slipped beyond the margins of realism without being classifiable as fantasy or science fiction."
— Amy Gentry, Los Angeles Review of Books
Read more…

Buy all of Robert Jackson Bennett's books here...

"It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything." — Dianne Wynne Jones

"Reflections on the Magic of Writing is a collection of some thirty pieces written over the years by the late Diana Wynne Jones. Most are short, like her comments on “Reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia” or her review of Mervyn Peake’s Boy in Darkness, and several are occasional, like her unpublished letter of 1991 to the TLS on “The Value of Learning Anglo-Saxon”, or the school Speech Day address of 2008 on “Our Hidden Gifts.” Longer pieces include a previously published article on “The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings,” three lectures given on “A Whirlwind Tour of Australia” in 1992, and a conference paper from 1997, “Inventing the Middle Ages.” [...]
     Her memories of Tolkien are, however, untouched by sentiment. She confirms the reports that he was a dreadful lecturer, disorganized and inaudible, so bad that she wonders if he was doing it on purpose; for in those days, if you had driven your audience away by, say, the third week, you could cancel the rest of the seven-week course 'and still get paid.' She sat there obdurately, however, and learned a lot about the way you could tweak a story from simple quest-narrative to The Pardoner’s Tale. Her long analysis of The Lord of the Rings as a series of movements, each with its own coda, says more about that narrative than, I suspect, Tolkien could."
— Tom Shippey, The Times Literary Supplement
Read more...

You can buy this book and all of Dianne Wynne Jones' other books here...

An Open Secret

From: Project Gutenberg

"It is a sun-baked afternoon deep in the Kentish countryside which once left Frances Hodgson Burnett feeling 'flower drunk.' Hollyhocks skirt the old brick walls, lavender nods beneath the weight of drowsy bees and the ivy-wreathed archway of my childhood fantasies is just one step ahead of me. It’s a step that children have dreamed of taking for 100 years. A step into a world of friendship, mysteries and magic. A step into The Secret Garden.
[...] The gardens at Great Maytham Hall [are] open to the public once a year as part of the National Gardens Scheme. See www.ngs.org.uk for more details."
— Helen Brown, The Telegraph
Read more...

And buy The Secret Garden here...