Editorial

Narration, voice, and compelling storytelling

Over the Transom: The Voice

Editorial
BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

What makes narration work? Voice, the confident delivery of narration, is a cornerstone of making it work.

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

Interactive Narrative and WordPlay

Editorial

Non Fiction
BY The Editors

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

AE #17

Letter from the Editors #17

Editorial
BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Four years. If AE were a person it would have just started junior kindergarten. But magazines grow up far faster than that, especially today. We say a ten-year old dog is seventy in “dog years” because, like a seventy-year-old human, that dog is starting to get within spitting distance of its life expectancy. If we apply that logic to magazines, AE is ancient. Only 20% of new periodicals survive to celebrate a fourth birthday, making us about 90 in magazine years.

A breeding ground for dangerous visions

Still, Dangerous Visions

Editorial

Reviews
BY The Editors

With each story individually introduced by Ellison and then played off with an afterword by their authors, the Dangerous Visions books stand as an incomparable monument in the history of science fiction. I am not the only one to lament the fact that the planned third volume The Last Dangerous Visions never saw the light of day.

Dark is Cool

Over the Transom: The Not-So-Dark Future

Editorial
BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

You’ll hear the same advice repeated in books, magazines, and blogs aimed at writers: Do bad things to your characters. Raise the stakes. Give them something they care about and then take it away. And then do it again.

Gender in Pacific Rim: The Mako Mori Problem

Editorial
BY The Editors

Structures of Magic

Midterms at the Magic Academy

Editorial
BY D.F. McCourt

There’s an exclusive private school in the hills. Youngsters from all over come to attend, drawn by programs and curricula that are simply unavailable anywhere else. It’s a boarding school, of course, and the students rarely, if ever, come into town.

The shortest of shorts

Over the Transom: Writing Micro

Editorial
BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

Micro: the wild and elusive subgenre of truly tiny tales

Bleeding genres in myth, legend, and science fiction

Bleeding of Genres: Myth and Legend

Editorial

Non Fiction
BY J.J.S. Boyce

We’re all swimming in culture, all of the time. Humans are natural story-tellers. Even on an individual level we have those defining stories of the time we did X or saw Y. And any fictional world that is expected to be taken seriously, whose inhabitants are to be accepted as real people, must have its own stories and art and culture and political views. It’s not enough to make a passing mention of it. We need to see some of it.

1+1=2

Math Plus Speculative Fiction Equals Awesome

Editorial

Non Fiction
BY J.J.S. Boyce

Is mathematics a science, after all? Those university friends of mine who took mathematics majors did end up with bachelors of science degrees, just as surely as my physics kin. In Tobias Dantzig’s beautiful 1930 history of the field (titled, simply, Number), he refers to mathematics as a science quite unapologetically. Friedrich Gauss called it the Queen of Sciences.

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