There is an ugly phrase in our world: a world redolent of prejudice and hate, a phrase implicit in the discrimination against dozens of minorities, a phrase of evil. This phrase is… genre fiction. Once upon a time there was a happy, free land of infinite size called “Fictionia” and all sorts of things lived there in equality, liberty […]
As in the late Robert Jordan (1). I never actually read any Jordan. He was always so ferociously ubiquitous. By the time I became aware of the phenomenon that was Robert Jordan, everyone around me was reading book 6 or 7 of The Wheel of Time and the utter weight of literature placed an effective barrier to […]
Well, not Redwall, obviously, and as previously stated, but it put me in mind of a peculiarity of terminology that’s come up. So, not the book yet, despite repeated promises. Something’s been bugging me, so to speak… For those that aren’t aware of it, the Redwall series, which to my debit I have not read, concerns the […]
Actually, before all that, what was that about insects? After promising some manner of insectery, which in itself is a monstrous and unwieldly neologism (1), I appear to have failed to deliver. The thronging hordes in their millions of species have been conspicuously absent. Even the affectation “the insect man” is currently unsubstantiated.(2) Why, then, “theinsectman”?(6) […]
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