Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher Tor Books, 2022 [ #24 Top of the Heap: A book on any Top Whatever list. ] This is another of those books I got from the Little Free Library down the street. I was surprised to find it there, because it’s so recent, so niche, and was so …
Since so many of the current Romantasy crop of novels involves variations or inspirations from the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, here’s another mashup… in AI this time. The originals are here and here.
Art created in AI. Arthur Rackham-like, no?
For many years my favorite science fiction novel was The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. The book was a comfort read for me. I had read it so often I could quote it, and given a sentence or two from anywhere in the book, I could tell what came before, and what came after. …
The Problem of Susan and Other Stories by Neil Gaiman (writer); P. Craig Russell (art and adpatation); Scott Hampton (art); Paul Chadwick (art), Lovern Kindzierski (art); Galen Showman, Rick Parker, Gaspar Saladino (lettering) Dark Horse Books, 2019 Finally, after 2 1/2 years, I’m getting around to writing a review of this book. For those who …
As I wrote in my previous post, Queen Swanwhite is something of an oddity, in Narnian terms. The reader hears about her only through the comments of another character, unlike, say, Ram the Great and King Erlian, two other characters the reader never meets but receive a mention from Lewis-the-narrator with the authorial weight that …
In Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series, one of the main characters is Gurgi, a sort of apelike wild man who Taran, the protagonist of the series, first encounters living in the forest. Though a pest at first, Gurgi later grows into his own as a hero and participant in Taran’s quest. Though Gurgi struck …
Illustrations for the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast all seem to highlight the same moment, as portrayed here. The two are seated together, the beast pledging his devotion, while Beauty looks away, pleased but ambivalent. This one, using the palette and style of the 1960s, shows the encounter in slightly abstracted form, with a …
Russian fairy tales have a cast of characters rarely heard above in the West. I believe the pic above is of Alkonost and Sirin, two mythical, woman-headed birds with bewitching voices. Unlike the sirens, they used their singing for good, bringing happiness to those deserving. The cave full of giant gem crystals is an unfamiliar …
The plasticity of fairy tales is demonstrated by these illustrations of Beauty and the Beast from over the years. In the original fairy tale, the Beast is never explicitly described, so artists had to use their imaginations. From the top left, going clockwise, he’s a spotted hyena, a wolf-boar, a very weird walrus-mole hybrid, and …