Recently, I was interviewed for the excellent Weird Studies podcast. The episode, titled “On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin,” dropped yesterday. You can listen to it with the player above or by clicking through to the site itself. Here’s the episode description: Neil Gaiman wrote, If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are…
Tag: fantasy
My chapter in ‘The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror’
I’m pleased to announce that The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror, just out from Britain’s Flame Tree Publishing, contains a chapter by me. S. T. Joshi served as consultant editor for the project. He also wrote the book’s introduction. Ramsey Campbell provided the foreword. Other chapter contributors include Roger Luckhurst, Mike Ashley, Michael…
Ursula K. Le Guin: Poets and visionaries are “realists of a larger reality”
Here are some powerful, moving, and beautiful words from Ursula K. Le Guin at the recent National Book Awards, where she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and used the opportunity to talk about the value of visionary literature and the ugliness and danger of treating books as pure commodities: I rejoice…
Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreamlands’ – A stunning six-minute teaser trailer
If this isn’t impressive, then I don’t know what is. I never thought (or allowed myself to hope) that someone would end up pursuing a long-form project to make a feature film incorporating / adapting / celebrating Lovecraft’s Dreamland tales. Simply amazing. Read more about it here. Watch the crowdfunding campaign video here. THE DREAMLANDS…
Last of the Titans: A Note on the Passing of Ray Harryhausen (and Forrest Ackerman and Ray Bradbury)
EDITOR’S NOTE: With this post we welcome award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, composer, and artist Jason V. Brock to the Teem. Jason’s work has been published in Butcher Knives & Body Counts, Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities, Fungi, Fangoria, S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings series, and elsewhere. He was Art Director/Managing Editor for Dark Discoveries magazine…
Homer, Tolkien, and the ontology of visionary states in a materialist age
In his new book The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience, English professor, writer, and classical guitarist Robert Tindall, writing with psychology professor and transpersonal psychotherapist Susana Bustos, “Weav[es] together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine…
C. S. Lewis and H. P. Lovecraft on loathing and longing for alien worlds
Several years ago — almost seven, in fact (he said with a sense of temporal vertigo) — I published a series of posts here about what I then termed the “autumn longing,” that exquisite, fleeting, piercing experience of being tantalized by a vision of ultimate beauty and fulfillment that trembles just beyond the edge of…
Lovecraftian Legacy
A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part Two NOTE: This article is the second in a series. It follows directly on from Part One, which sets the stage. * * * Having established that Lovecraft’s stories can be at least vaguely cheerful and optimistic, and that they can also feature feats of heroism…
Crossover (SHORT FILM)
Is it a fable or parable, perhaps? About ecology or religion, maybe? If it’s the latter, is it a symbolic statement about the means by which organized/institutional Christianity has historically been disseminated to, and often forced upon, “primitive” peoples? Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating piece of work that has drawn a lot of attention,…
Economic doom redux: REALMS OF FANTASY and DREAMS OF DECADENCE shutting down
It’s official: Realms of Fantasy magazine is now history, as announced by publisher Warren Lapine at the magazine’s website today (“A Farewell Note from the Publisher“) and repeated by Locus (“Realms of Fantasy Folds“). We’ll all recall that ROF previously announced they were folding early last year. Some of you will also recall that I…