Talk about Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and someone inevitably hums or whistles that famous five-note sequence created by John Williams for the film. A recent viewing of the film got me thinking about other intersections between music and science fiction. Music abounds in fantasy: See how easy that was? I really […]

Here at Speculative Chic, we tend to put the emphasis on the positive (in fact, we do it every week with our column My Favorite Things), but every now and then something just lets us down. Sometimes our favorite TV shows take an unfortunate turn. Sometimes the movies we were looking forward to don’t live […]

Welcome back to Sound Off!, a semi-regular column where members of Speculative Chic gather together to chat about the latest BIG THING in entertainment. This time, we’ve flown in from all over to discuss Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which premiered in the United States on Friday, December 16th, 2016. Sound Off! is meant […]

In This Month’s Changing the Map Gentle readers, why are there so many more dystopias than utopias in fantastic fiction? We’ve seen a staggering resurgence of dystopic movies, books, and television shows, all portraying terrifying and depressing futures. Zombies, ecological disasters, oppressive political regimes, alien overlords… and that’s the short list. So what’s up? Do our inner […]

When someone mentions fantasy book covers, inevitably a stereotypical image pops up. One of knights standing near dragons, perhaps a chain-mail bra-clad woman with him. Or at least, that’s what used to be the norm. As today’s standards of what’s “cool” and socially acceptable continue to shift, so do the covers of speculative fiction books. […]

People can come into bookstores with some pretty odd notions. Most of the time they’re confusing the bookstore for a library. Other times they just think they know better than the booksellers. But the truth is that the customer is far from right (and whoever coined that phrase clearly never worked in a bookstore — […]

September 14, 2018 Music is everywhere! Our favorite moments in movies, video games, and television almost always have some kind of musical accompaniment. From the hauntingly beautiful “Light of the Seven” which accompanied a crucial scene in season six of Game of Thrones (no spoilers at the link) to the plethora of musical tidbits from […]

This year I resolved to read more classic science fiction and fantasy, hopefully making a dent in that stack of books I really should have read by now. Mostly because they should be good books, but also to be better informed about my genre and its history. I decided that this meant reading six science fiction […]

This year I resolved to read more classic science fiction and fantasy, hopefully making a dent in that stack of books I really should have read by now. Mostly because they should be good books, but also to be better informed about my genre and its history. I decided that this meant reading six science fiction […]

Hello, fantastic readers! What a strange week it’s been! Wednesday was Independence Day in the USA. Sadly, no alien overlords came to visit. But, some of us got an extra day off from work out of it, so that’s good, right? Right. How was your week? Did you do something exciting? If you live in […]

I’d always thought that dressing up as Sailor Venus would be fun. We had a lot of the same traits — long, blonde(ish) hair, a love of food, a desire to destroy bad guys, etc. But aside from Halloween, there wasn’t any point. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about conventions and the […]

April 6, 2017 No, we’re not getting on a giant boat with a lot of animals — that’s an ark. ARC stands for Advance Reading Copy. Or Advance Review Copy. Or Advanced Reader’s Copy. Or you might see ARE for Advance Reader’s Edition. The point is that a book that is labeled as such is […]

There exists the old adage: Don’t judge a book by its cover. This is quite true, as the inside of a book can be excellent but the cover doesn’t do the story justice. Yet at the same time, having a good book cover is very important. It doesn’t matter if you’re with a big publishing […]

July 17, 2018 Dystopias have been a part of the map since the start of the 20th century – a grim set of countries and worlds lying under a gray fog, ready to remind us of our potential follies. If utopias are our dreams, dystopias are our nightmare realms.   Regular dystopian fiction focuses on […]