F. Brett Cox is a writer, editor, and educator living in (currently) snowy Vermont. He and Andy Duncan co-edited the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (2004). Over years of teaching, as over years of anything, recurrent themes emerge. Here are a couple from my experience teaching college-level classes in sf. The arguments [...]

In this edition of the Locus Roundtable podcast, I sat down with the two author Guests of Honor from this year’s International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts: Terry Bisson and Connie Willis. They sat down to spend some time talking about writing short stories, how they got started in the field, writing in [...]

In Salon Futura #7, Ken MacLeod writes on “SF and IR” (IR here meaning International Relations). An essay by Roundtable contributor Paul Graham Raven on the first essay in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. Thoughtful comments by Jonathan McCalmont and Paul Kincaid follow. Speaking of Jonathan, he reviews Gary K. Wolfe’s Evaporating Genres on Ruthless [...]

Aga is a Ph. D. student and tutor studying at Middlesex University in the UK. She recently presented a paper to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts titled: “The Magic of Self-Sacrifice in Fantasy Literature.” ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up?’ asked the philosophy lecturer during my first [...]

Stefan Ekman has a Ph.D. in English Literature with a dissertation on fantasy settings. He teaches creative writing at Lund University and Kristianstad University (Sweden). He also teaches fantasy and sf on various levels. The most challenging – and the most rewarding – class I teach each year is the science fiction and fantasy unit [...]

Jonathan Strahan and Gary Wolfe aren’t going to let a small thing like ICFA stand in the way of their Coode St. podcasting! So last night Gary rounded up a few people to join them this week: myself (Karen Burnham), Locus Editor-in-Chief Liza Trombi, and award-winning author Jeff Ford. We sat down with a microphone [...]

Farah Mendlesohn is the author and editor of numerous non-fiction works about science fiction literature, including the Hugo award winning Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Her recent works include The Intergalactic Playground (on genre fiction for children) and editing collected essays On Joanna Russ. I have never taught fiction as part of a literature/literature criticism [...]

James Patrick Kelly is a writer, teacher and anthologist living in New England. He is a regular in Asimov’s magazine, and has won two Hugo awards: for “Think Like a Dinosaur” and “Ten to the Sixteenth to One.” I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago at Boskone called Workshops: Compare and Contrast, [...]

Our latest podcast features Cecelia Holland and Ellen Klages, both of whom write historical fiction as well as fantastic fiction. They will also both be at ICFA this week! In the course of this podcast they talk about doing research (Ellen focuses on the 20th century, while Cecelia usually works in more distant times), how [...]

This week many of us at Locus will be off in Florida at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, affectionately known as ICFA. This is an academic conference that also attracts a number of writers and editors. It runs from March 16 to March 20, and this year features Guests of Honor [...]