Edward Cullen is only the latest fad in the history of vampire obsession.
Today’s news focuses on science fiction and fantasy, from the Nebula Awards to vampires to an emerging genre of paranoid fiction. Speaking of which, is that your boss looking over your shoulder?
- The 2009 Nebula Award finalists have been announced, and Omnivoracious blogger Jeff VanderMeer (who also happens to be a nominated author), gives a brief overview of finalists in the novel, short story, novelette, and novella categories. Vandermeer senses a welcome broadening of the Nebula Award’s criteria, writing, “In the past, the Nebula has seemed fairly conservative to me, but in the short fiction categories at least the nominations below begin to hint at a coming sea-change.”
- NPR’s article “For Love Of Do-Good Vampires: a Bloody Book List” confirms what we’ve all suspected–the vampire craze really is everywhere. In the piece, NPR contributer Margot Adler confesses to reading 75 vampire books in the past nine months, which led her to some fascinating questions about what our love of vampires says about us as a culture. She talks to other vampire experts (aka, literature professors and critics) who suggest that the vampire stories of each generation say something about society’s underlying fears. It’s up to you how you interpret Adler’s summary of today’s vampire, who “are all struggling to be moral even though they are predators by nature.”
- And from vampires to other dark fiction, Word Play‘s Sonja Belle discusses an emerging genre of teen fiction that she calls “novels of the paranoid.” She defines these as “stories in which characters live in a weird, oppressive world with arbitrary rules; a general sense of dread gradually resolves into a certainty that there is an evil force in charge, and that the evil force is out to get us, personally.” Unlike The Hunger Games, the characters in these novels are trapped by forces that aren’t human, such as a living prison in Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron. Other new YA books that Belle includes in her “novels of the paranoid” are The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Dreamhunter by Elizabeth Knox, and The Midnight Charter by David Whitley.
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