We are inundated by fiction. Every trip to the few remaining bookshops has more and more books marching along the shelves, magically procreating like the enchanted brooms in Disney’s Fantasia. There are so many books […]
There is a small fishing island in Japan, Tashirojima, which has been dubbed “cat heaven” because of the phenomenal amount of stray cats living there – there are more cats than people! It sounds, to […]
“Mortal, you have angered Shaka-sama and now Pigsy will eat your face.” This is one of the improbable lines that is never spoken in the foundational saga of Buddhist fiction. Many other improbable lines are. Further out on the improbability spectrum: Shingo Katori costumes up as a monkey.
Even casual fans of anime have heard of Cowboy Bebop, the jazziest, classiest, most sophisticated space opera anime to ever be created (whoops, my bias is showing). Bebop’s director, Shinichiro Watanabe, and musical composter, Yoko […]
The formative American experience was the conquest of the western frontier. Would science fiction and fantasy exist without the frontier model? What does Japan’s parallel conquest of Hokkaido tell us about the legacy of colonial expansion?
Are there too many people on the planet? Science fiction bears much of the responsibility for spreading this meme, which can be unpleasantly tinged with racism. But now and again a great science fiction author develops a more inspiring and pro-human approach to the population question.
Epic fantasy is a hard sell in Japan. Why? A country so saturated in the fantastic seemingly ought to have an affinity for our beloved genre. But shared passions often get lost in translation.
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