Studies in Fantasy Literature, Issue Three edited by Benjamin Szumskyj

Format: Softcover, 40 pages

Publisher: Seele Brennt Publications, May 2005

ISBN: FanLit3

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A Scholarly Journal for the Study of the Fantasy Genre.

Contents of Issue no. 3:

Leonard Cline's After-Walker: The Poem and an Explication by Douglas A. Anderson. A bio-critical study of Cline's metaphysical poem, which possesses a strangeness to it that puts it in that gray zone between fantastic and mundane.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier's News from the Moon by Brian Stableford. A critical study, accompanied by a reprinting of Mercier's fantastic adventure of a communication from the world of the dead conveyed by means of a beam of concentrated light reflected from the moons surface.

A Conversation with Tim Powers by Benjamin Szumskyj. A World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Mythopoeic, Locus Poll, International Horror Guild, SF Chronicle, and Apollo Award winner, Tim Powers has written eleven novels and several short stories. This is a brand new interview with the legendary fantasy writer.

Moral Law, Secondary Worlds, and Crossed Planes: Some Thoughts Upon the Nature of Fantasy by Dr. Frank Coffman. It is interesting that Robert E. Howard's brief, creative life should be lived in part and ended at Cross Plains, Texas. The varied vistas of central Texas offered springboards of inspiration for the writer's backgrounds, but the town name coincidentally suggests an angle of approach and interpretation to the broader genre of all fantastic fiction. This principle could properly be called - The Principle of Juxtaposition - or of Bold Relief, the notion that Fantasy is important and powerful as a genre in that, when it succeeds, it enables us to see objective and inviolable and unalterable Truth against a background of untruth.

Review: The Three Perils of Man by Mark Hanford. Knights and nobles, wizards and kings - published in 1822, The Three Perils of Man by James Hogg may have a claim to be the first true fantasy novel.

Review: Affairs at Hampden Ferrers: An English Romance by Michael Moorcock. For almost fifty years Brian Aldiss has astonished us with the variety and quality of his output. Confronting current concerns, Affairs at Hamden Ferrers is like no other fiction he has written, yet is unmistakeably an Aldiss novel.