Karen Burnham Karen Joy Fowler points out this clip from a recent, controversial Andrew O’Hehir review of the Avengers: At what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and [...]

I took advantage of John Scalzi’s swing through Houston on his book tour promoting the new novel Redshirts. We talk about touring, audiences, Ray Bradbury, the Golden Age, and how Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy killed sf humor for a generation. A short, fast conversation that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Karen Burnham Last week we lost Ray Bradbury at the age of 91. Perhaps one of the most influential and most widely read sf authors of the last hundred years. Would anyone like to reflect on his passing? As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like [...]

I’d like to thank all the poets who contributed to our series of speculative fiction (or science fiction) poetry. For convenience, this post will have links to all the individual entries in the series and to all the venues recommended for further reading. Locus Roundtable Posts Podcast: Mike Allen and F. J. Bergmann in Conversation [...]

Michael A. Arnzen has won four Bram Stoker Awards (including one for Poetry) and has been publishing speculative fiction and poetry since 1989. His latest book is The Gorelets Omnibus: Collected Poetry, 2001-2011 (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2012) — a compendium of his twisted and often funny imaginations from the past decade. Arnzen holds a [...]

David C. Kopaska-Merkel is the editor and publisher of Dreams and Nightmares magazine. Speculative poetry. What is it and does it matter? If you know what speculative fiction is, and you know what poetry is, then you know what speculative poetry is, too. The medium goes back a ways. One can argue that Gilgamesh is [...]

Robert Frazier is an author, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons and Star*Line, as well as collections such as Invisible Machines. Karen has asked me to pipe in with some historical perspective on speculative poetry. Antecedents like Blake and Poe and the Odyssey abound, but the movement didn’t [...]

Joanne Merriam is the editor of 7×20 and Upper Rubber Boot Books, and her poetry has been published in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Scifaikuest and Strange Horizons as well as literary markets like Cordite, The Fiddlehead, Room of One’s Own and Stand. I started Upper Rubber Boot Books to publish those voices working [...]

Mari Ness is a poet and a blogger at Tor.com. Poetry, fantasy and science fiction have long been deeply intertwined. Some of the earliest myths were sung, not spoken, in resonant verse that still echoes today. Shakespeare combined poetry and fairies, as did Spenser – in highly popular entertainments. And yet somewhere along the line, [...]