Archive
-
A Little Light Reading Part 2: Faster Than Light Travel
In my previous post, I discussed the power and creativity that can stem from omitting faster than light travel from science fiction universes. Space opera…
-
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping: The Krampus in Your Christmas Eve Closet
There is a difference between Saint Nicholas being good and being moral. While most people could agree that his actions sit more on the positive…
-
A Sampling of Systems: Magic in Fantasy 101
Magic: it’s a primordial element of the fantasy genre. Readers and writers of fantasy know that the genre is often stigmatized for its mages, sorcery…
-
Castle in the Sky: Entering Miyazaki’s World With Guillermo del Toro @ TIFF Bell Lightbox
The first time I watched Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky I was twelve and sitting in my basement alone. I had been watching Miyazaki movies…
-
Antiquity to Dystopia: Genre-Crossing Symbolism in Lang’s Metropolis
Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic, Metropolis, depicts a dystopian future in which an oppressed class of workers is forced to live underground by the wealthy elite…
-
Fears internal, Tropes eternal: Themes in horror
An effective horror story should grip its reader’s attention, increase their sense of dread and then twist them in order to elicit the fear of…
-
Authorial Oracles: 5 Dystopian Writers Who Speculated Accurately
Dystopian and science fiction authors have been acting as the world’s literary clairvoyants for some time now. Here are a handful of twentieth century authors…
-
A Most Unexpectedly Happy Journey: A Ringer’s Quest to See The Hobbit
From 2001-2003, silver screens across the globe became lenses into another world: Middle Earth. This wasn’t the first time a speculative film attracted such widespread…
-
Dreadful Realities: A Review of The Twilight Zone
** Spoiler Warnings Galore As a child, nothing terrified me more than the dazzling ‘space’ known as The Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone was never…
The Spectatorial 