Writing in SFNovelists, Butler explains:

I tried to write a thriller. It was the last book I worked on before starting Reiffen's Choice, the first book I sold. The problem was, I don't like thrillers. Never have, never will. At least not reading them. (I've always loved thriller movies.) But I had this great idea, and a great ending. A shootout on top of Mt. Washington in a June snowstorm. Very visual. I was sure I could sell it.

But first I had to write it. Boy, was that painful. Like I said, I hate thrillers. My idea was about a serial killer who murders child molesters, and the biggest problem was that I had to write all these molestation flashbacks and come up with about half a dozen creative, graphic murders. Very nasty. I stated really dreading my time at the keyboard.

Even worse, it was boring. I was boring myself, which is a terrible sign. If you don't jump up and punch the air in celebration once every couple of weeks about a scene you've just written, chances are no one else is going to punch the air about it, either. If the writer's bored, pity the poor reader.

Thank goodness Butler finally switched to working on the fantasy novel he was actually excited about before his gritty gun-toting thriller hero nearly killed him. Anyway, "write what you love" seems like basic advice, but it's something many writers ignore to their cost.

Gill, who's executive editor at Harper Collins imprints Morrow/Avon/Eos, writes over at Harper Library:

Urban fantasy (and its cousin paranormal romance) is the easiest gateway to the genre-since it takes place in a world that is very much our own, only with magic. Not coincidentally, it's also the hottest thing going, between the phenomenon that is Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga to the incredibly popular True Blood tv series. Urban fantasies are an easy way for readers to try the genre, and there are a lot of great ones out there.

With urban fantasy consuming an ever-greater market share, it's hard to argue with Gill's point. But it makes us wonder if science fiction isn't suffering partly because it lacks such an easy, newbie-friendly first hit. Or rather, that stuff exists, but it's not necessarily leading people to science fiction.

You have adventure stories set in the present day, but with fantastical gadgets, but those are generally marketed as "techno-thrillers" rather than SF. And when a science fiction giant like William Gibson does novels that are set in the present or very near future, featuring unusual technology, they're frequently marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF. Meanwhile, writers like Charles Stross are proclaiming that you literally cannot write near-future science-fiction at all, because the future is so unpredictable, and many of the genre's most celebrated works take place thousands, or even millions, of years from now.

Do we need someone to invent the genre of "urban science fiction" to reach out to people who want to read SF stories set in the present day, in a familiar setting? Or just a return to "five minutes into the future" as a standard setting for stories?

Top image: cover to Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty.

Writer Mark Charan Newton (Nights Of Viijamur) cites some reasons why "science fiction is dying and fantasy is the future," including the movie popularity of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings, the predominance of female readers, and fact that real-life science is now as full of "sensawunda" as science fiction.

But game designer Andrew P. Mayer has a different explanation — fantasy is more relevant to our near future than science fiction:

Steampunk is the most obvious example. While it is generally considered to be a genre is fascinated with the past, it is, in its own way, truly futuristic. By telling stories of transformed ancestors it allows us to redefine our vision of ourselves from the other end of the telescope. It is a kind of pseudo-fantasy for a world that is clinging onto the real as it moves beyond the virtual. They are tales of a reality where humanity may on the cusp of truly becoming magicians, capable of transforming the physical world in more radical ways than we ever imagined possible.

And fantasy seems oddly predictive in other ways as well. The threat of global warming seems to be something out of Tolkein rather than Asimov, although without the convenient anthropomorphic villain to slay in order to solve our problems and set the world "right". Our solutions may have to come through acceptance of our abilities rather than an attempt to fight against them...

By populating our modern urban landscapes with creatures of myth, we could be giving ourselves metaphorical stories for the kinds of radical choices that may soon be coming for the human race. And for a generation that will have far more control over their own biology than any that has come before, it may well more helpful to have grown up with those of fantasies as opposed to rocket ships and space aliens.

What do you think? Could fantasy be providing us with more touchstones for our troubling future than science fiction right now? It's an intriguing argument, to say the least.

Robot dragon photo from Coated.

Grossman's list is non-ordered, so these are all ranked as equally awesome:

— The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
— The Once and Future King by T.H. White
— Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories
— The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
— Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
— Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

You can read more about why he chose each one at The Week.

On his blog over at Time, Grossman admitted it was practically impossible to narrow the list down:

All I could do was make sure that there was a mix of newer and older books, and male and female authors, and that every book on there was not only an absolute indisputable classic, that I personally loved, but one that completely changed the game when it was published.

Image by Embley via Deviant Art.

Grossman explained his disappointment in JK Rowling's choice of future for her boy hero to Newsarama.com:

I loved Harry Potter, but that epilogue was such an astounding failure of imagination on Rowling's part! And in a way, it throws the entirety of all seven novels into doubt retroactively.

I felt the problem she failed to solve was the question of, "here's a young man who can do magic, who has defeated the enemy of humanity when her was 18 – what's the rest of his life look like?" And the best she can imagine is that he marries his high school sweetheart and puts on a big gut and lives in the suburbs. What a disaster!

He went on to say,

There has to be some better fate for Harry Potter than what he gets. I think that's something of the message of [Grossman's new book] The Magicians – you're not going to go to Narnia, but there has to be something better than that bourgeois suburban mediocrity that seems like the only alternative.

Somewhere, a million Potter fans are sharpening their knives in preparation for revenge.

The MAGIC of Lev Grossman [Newsarama.com]

[Custom Creature Taxidermy via Super Punch]

Three-headed Frankensquirrel
Capricorn
Chimera
El Chupcabra
Feejee Mermaid
Flying Monkey
Frankensquirrel
Gold Griffin
Unicorn
Vampire Squirrel
Two-headed Chick
Two-headed Squirrel

The "Urban Fantasy As Alternate History" panel at WFC 2009 made a compelling case that you can't introduce magical elements to a present-day world, or to the history of a present-day world, without all of the social institutions being rearranged. Besides Willingham and Grimwood, the panel included Paul Park, L.E. Modesitt, and Michael Swanwick. Among other things:

• If magic was real, it would be illegal. Or else, it would be regulated and taxed.
• If ghosts were real, as in Modesitt's novels, all sorts of institutions would change — women who died in childbirth would hang around, and the birth rate would probably go down.
• There would be civil rights movements for ghosts and the undead — and if they could vote, they would probably a majority.
• There would be whole new careers and economic sectors associated with magical and fantastical creatures.

Most of all, people in these "urban fantasy" worlds would take for granted many things that would shock us utterly. Says Willingham, "In my world, vampires are real, and they're just part of society." Adds Swanwick: "Gorillas used to be cryptobiology," until they became commonly known.

"There's kind of poignancy in the prosaic state," says Park.

Swanwick praised Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire, in which shamanistic magic has pervaded "our" world, and now daily mouse sacrifices are required to keep your electricity on, and there are parades with bare-breasted cheerleaders with blood running down their faces. "It's prosaic and ordinary to everyone else, but absolutely strange to us, the reader."

Anticipate lots of weird legal questions if the supernatural became part of everday life — like, if a vampire "turns" you, is that murder? Or maybe a jury would rule that the vampire is actually giving the "victim" a gift: eternal life. Or maybe it's theft, because the vampire is robbing you of the promise of death. If you believe in Christianity, is the vampire robbing you of the possibility of salvation in the afterlife? Is a newly turned vampire a new person, with no existing property rights, or does he/she keep all the property from his/her life? The lawyers, as they say, would have a field day.

"Legal fictions are every bit as fantastic as magic, and yet they wield the same power," says Swanwick.

Why does fantasy lend itself to noir themes?

Well, I imagine there are many - not least among the core fantasy readership - who'd say it doesn't; but then again those are the same people who can apparently read stories of noble warrior kings and peasants without ever thinking about the social implications of a world in which power is either hereditary or derived from brute force and steel. For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily HAS to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds. Noir is above all an ADULT form. It's a narrative technique which deals in the ubiquitous nature of humanity's failings under pressure - and there are few places you'd see those failings so luridly played out as in the pre-modern societies so beloved of most epic fantasy. Forget Chandler's nineteen thirties LA mean streets - what do you think the mean streets of your average feudal city state would have looked like? And what would you have to go through to extract some modicum of justice from that reeking mess?

Is there something about our current era (with the economic disaster, bank bailouts, etc.) that lends itself especially well to stories about morally grey heroes in corrupt, violent settings?

No more than any other recent period in modern history, I think. What has perhaps happened is that we have begun - slowly, painfully - unlearning all the shiny bright lies told to us by our rulers; Know Your Place; Don't Answer Back; Father Knows Best; Dulce Et Decorum Est; Nice Girls Don't.......and so forth. We're starting to see — and this has, I think, been on-going since at least the end of the first world war — that the worst enemies are usually within, in our own darkest urges and impulses, in the corruption of our leaders and the fallibility of our social systems, in cynically fostered ignorance and inherent human cruelty. The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fictions attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

And do you feel like you're part of a noir fantasy movement?

Yeah - me and Joe Abercrombie; we've just been officially designated twin key exponents of the sub-genre "Fuck Fantasy"! See the "A Song Of Ice and Fire" messageboard, thread titled "The Blade Itself vs The Steel Remains" for more details. :-)))))))))))) No, but seriously folks - all this talk of literary movements makes me very nervous; I guess there is - and has been since at least the late nineties - a wave of writers striving to popularise a more honest vision of the epic fantasy landscape, but I think it'd be a mistake to lump us all together; individual authors tend to have their own quite specific agendas - I know I do - and similarity does not necessarily indicate any kind of organised or coherent manifesto.

After having just tracked the most popular fantasy book cover art elements, Holman has turned his eye to urban fantasy's rise among speculative book genres. Using sales data from Nielsen/Bookscan, Holman shows that urban fantasy accounts for only 14 percent of the genre's titles — but it claimed 45 percent of SF/F bestsellers.

This chart shows the rise of urban fantasy among fantasy (not SF/fantasy) bestsellers in the last several years:

So if a large number of urban fantasy books are outselling all other science fiction and fantasy books, but publishers are still putting out relatively few urban fantasy books, it doesn't take a marketing whiz to see what comes next. Says Holman:

The rise of urban fantasy has without any doubt been the biggest category shift within the SFF market of the last 10 years in the US...

How does this affect SFF publishers? Naturally, publishers respond to trends (and publishers tend to spend more time and energy trying to follow trends than setting them). If, for example, higher sales can be expected from an urban fantasy debut than a hard-SF debut, more publishers will be more inclined to publish more urban fantasy debuts than hard-SF debuts. More authors being published in one category will generally mean fewer authors being published in another. Particularly when the alpha category starts to dominate bestseller charts...

It's up to individual publishers, of course, to determine the balance of their lists, and thankfully we don't all end up with the same strategy. However, publishers are still likely to reconfigure to some extent when there is a significant category shift in the market. For example, editors with expertise in the urban fantasy field are likely to be in higher demand (others less so). Why hire an editor with a brilliant publishing instinct for hard SF if hard SF only makes up 2% of the publisher's business?

Holman concludes that urban fantasy may not always be on top, and there may be another seismic shift down the line. And his company, Orbit, has made a strategic decision to focus on other types of science fiction and fantasy in addition to urban fantasy. He winds up hopeful that the rise of swords-and-skyscrapers lit is indicative of a surge of interest in speculative fiction generally. Here's hoping that these books are reaching a new audience, and might serve as a "gateway drug" to other kinds of stories that use our world as a departure point for journeys into the fantastical and the bizarre.

Bigger versions of the charts are at the link. [Tim Holman via MediaBistro]

And not surprisingly, swords are pretty much required if you want to let people know that they're about to read a novel set in a fantasy world. Or the present day with fantasy elements. I like that "glowy magic" is a close second to swords - anyone who has ever browsed a fantasy book aisle at the bookstore knows what that is. A blop of photoshopped shininess, often streaming from a sword or from the hands of a nubile creature in flowing robes. Or perhaps enveloping a dragon?

What remains to be done is an economic analysis of these cover elements, charting which ones tend to sell better.

Tim Holman, publisher of Orbit Books, writes:

I wonder if [this chart] will prove that glowy magic, while prevalent, might not guarantee glowy sales? Or if unicorn-lovers represent a vast untapped market? It wouldn't surprise me. More research is clearly needed, but this is an important starting point and I'd be prepared to devote literally minutes to the task if that's what it takes.

via The Publisher Files

This is the first look at the fantasy hero Bronco, both played by Sam Rockwell. We're overcome with a depthless love for the surveillance deer and bald foreign heroine. This place is what dreams are made of.

Also special attention needs to be paid to the science fiction writer who steals his pupils' story: Ronald Chevalier played by Flight of The Conchords' Jemaine Clement. After watching a second of Jemaine as Ronald, I can't even see the actor anymore, he's completely transformed.

The premise is pretty straight forward:

Benjamin (Michael Angarano), home-schooled by his eccentric mother (Jennifer Coolidge), is a loveable loner whose passion for writing leads him on an offbeat and hilarious journey as his story first gets ripped off by the legendary fantasy novelist, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) and then is adapted into a disastrous movie by the small town's most prolific homespun filmmaker.

But with Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess behind it, I'm hoping for a few small surprises and awkward moments.

Also take a peek at one of the Ronald Chevalier Fanfiction videos that are starting to collect online, it gives you an idea of what his "style" is like at least.

[via apple]

Miyazaki doesn't hesitate to show us his underwater vision, a dreamy land of shimmering squid, inquisitive fish, and swirling bubbles of jellyfish. This is where the sea wizard Fujimoto, an easily flustered fellow in a vaudevillian jacket voiced in the English-language version by Liam Neeson, practices his magic. Frustrated by the garbage dumped into his ocean waters, Fujimoto has developed an extreme hatred of humanity, and he is storing up magic to bring the sea back to the Devonian Era, ending the reign of humans. But his eldest daughter, a goldfish with a human face named Brunhilde, is not content to watch her father stew and brew, and quietly slips away one day to explore the rest of the sea.

After a run-in with a garbage trawler, Brunhilde is trapped inside a jar and washes up on the shore of a seaside town. There, she is discovered by five year-old Sosuke, who quickly recognizes her as a magical fish, dubs her "Ponyo," and vows to take care of her. Sosuke cares for Ponyo for the better part of a day, slipping out of school and bringing her to the senior center next door where his mother, Lisa, works, but Fujimoto manages to reclaim his wayward daughter, commanding the currents to seize her and bring her home.

But Ponyo has already fallen in love with the kind-hearted Sosuke, and, with the help of her little sisters, escapes her fathers home and steals his magic, transforming herself into a human so she may seek out Sosuke. Her transgression unleashes a tsunami on Japan and creates an imbalance that threatens to destroy the world, but that's of little concern to Ponyo, who simply wants to be reunited with Sosuke and learn to adapt to life on land.

Despite Fujimoto's grumbling about humans and their pollution, Ponyo contains little of the moralizing of Princess Mononoke or Howl's Moving Castle. Ecological disaster strikes, but when it does, it's caused not by humans and their ignorance, but by the magical beings that inhabit the ocean. And the people of Sosuke's town are a level-headed, competent bunch. When the town is flooded by the storm, they band together in boats and search the town for neighbors in need of assistance, and Sosuke's own home features its own amateur radio, propane tank, water tank, and generator. To all the human characters, the flood is treated not as a disaster, but an inconvenience, one that has added wonder to their world. It's not a movie about antagonists or conflict, but about self-sufficient characters who meet challenges and adventures head-on.

That Ponyo is character, rather than plot, driven is at once the film's greatest strength and its chief weakness. Ponyo and Sosuke (voiced respectively by the youngest Cyrus child and the youngest Jonas brother, as if the families were somehow indentured to Disney) convey all the wonder, severity, and fearlessness of being five years old, making their post-diluvian adventure both believable and a delight to watch. And Tina Fey as Lisa, who happily indulges her son's mystical notions but has trouble coping with her fisherman husband's long absences at sea, is at once maternal dutiful and impulsive, maternal and prone to fits of childishness. She, and most of the other characters in Ponyo feel multi-faceted and alive as soon as they step on screen, and much of the film's humor is derived from our instant affection for them.

But, like any proper, hyperactive five year olds, our heroes are far more interested in exploring their new world than in sticking to a fairytale script. There are no puzzles for Ponyo and Sosuke to solve, no powerful beings they need to impress, no villains to outwit. Eventually, Sosuke must pass a test of love, although it isn't even as substantial a test as the one Chihiro must pass at the end of Spirited Away, and Sosuke has no way of knowing that Ponyo's very life hangs in the balance. Even Fujimoto who seemed like a possible antagonist to be swayed by Sosuke's own earnestness seems to change his tune on humanity rather abruptly, landing him more in the category of comic relief than imposing wizard. As a result, the first half of the movie feels like a promising set up for a story that never happens. Ponyo and Sosuke don't seem to mind though, content as they are to travel through their flooded town on a magical boat and name all the prehistoric fishes they see below.

But even with a weak story behind it, Ponyo proves Miyazaki is still a master animator, one whose vision and attention to detail may be unparalleled. The tsunami, with waves represented as giant, eager fish, is at once beautiful in its magical elements and terrifying for its very realistic power, and once Sosuke's city is submerged, Miyazaki shows us the underwater remnants of suburbia as enticingly tranquil, rather than as skeletons of human society. And he can add humor to a scene by simply with the apt placement of an octopus or crab in the background. It's certainly a film whose visual elements will demand repeated watchings, and a light enough tale to make those watchings enjoyable.

In the first clip, we see Spader as Mr. Black motivating (and periodically firing) the employees of Black Box, the ominously ill-lit Apple send-up that employs the entire town:

Here, our hero Tobin "Toe" Thompson (whose parents are the ill-fated team leaders in the clip above), stands up to school bully (and daughter of Mr. Black) Helvetica by insisting she's in love with him:

Toe's bully-confronting strategy gets a little help from the wishing rock he finds, which enables him to conjure up a crew of aliens who prove as strong as they are tiny:

But naturally the wishes don't always go as planned, as when Toe's friend Loogie wishes for one of their crew to become super smart:

Or when "Nose" Noseworthy summons forth a sentient monster made from his own boogers:

We also get two clips from the Black Box employee party. First, Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann get too close for comfort:

Then Toe has another violent encounter with Helvetica:

Marchand - and author Robert Sawyer, whom he talks to for the piece - argue that SF has accidentally based two of its more famous staples on ideas that more properly belong in fantasy:

Two well known "celestial hieroglyphs," or semi-magical, semi-scientific mainstays of science fiction, are time travel and travel that exceeds the speed of light. The latter is considered a sheer impossibility by physicists, the former a hopeless paradox by philosophers. But no telling what those black holes will do! "Science fiction writers don't admit magic, they don't admit UFOs even, but they accept as given these two magical properties, so that, in a sense, even their science fiction is built on fantasy," Sawyer comments. The recent movie Star Trek is a case in point... "In every previous Star Trek film, the time travel that had been done had been done with some sort of machine or device that we could understand," Sawyer points out. "In this one, they just threw out something called ‘red matter.' It literally was a magic substance. It was pixie dust. There was no rationale or explanation given it. It was just magic they pulled out of the air - or, to phrase it less politely - out of the writer's butt."

But does science fiction really cease to be science fiction if you can't understand the science? I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The idea that science fiction has to be based on concepts that are explainable from today's viewpoint of science (or philosophy, to use Sawyer's argument against time travel) seems, to me, to be an argument against imagination and - to be both both and perhaps slightly ridiculous - the human spirit. Surely, one of the whole points of science fiction is to be forward looking and considering that which we do not already possess, in terms of technology, or knowledge, or society (And just by saying that, I'm sure that I've opened myself up to all manner of potential attacks; feel free to tell me why I'm wrong in the comments) and, from that, it's not unrealistic to expect/create technology that doesn't run on today's scientific rules?

I understand that some will always cry foul when a completely impossible, or non-scientific, concept is introduced as science fiction (Any godlike being with unlimited powers, for example), but for things like time travel or even Star Trek's McGuffin red matter, I think there's definitely an argument to be made for it being more - or more SF, at least - than just plain "fantasy." Part of this may be because of my own personal aversion to fantasy; I have this issue wherein I'm convinced that fantasy is always one step away from a Deus Ex Machina, no matter what the rules and internal logic of the particular story may be. Dumbledore dying in Harry Potter? Convinced he'll be back before too long. Things looking grim for Frodo in Lord Of The Rings? Firm in my belief that there's some get out of Mordor free card just over the next page. Fantasy, to me, exists in worlds where the rules can be entirely different, and be that way without any explanation other than "It's magic!" but science fiction has to at least try and make sense in the world we know of. To me, at least.

No matter how much bleed there is between SF and fantasy - and, to an extent, I agree with Marchand that there's becoming an increasing amount of bleed, especially as geek culture feeds into the mainstream, where such divisions go unnoticed and, in some ways, are unnecessary - science fiction remains, to me, a place where things are grounded in a factual representation of our universe, or else makes note of and tries to explain the differences. Star Trek may have time travel and red matter, but both are concepts that they approach in a way that is more than just pulling out of their ass, and which have consequences that feel more... real, to me, than the weightlessness of fantasy thinking.

More to the point, perhaps: if you're willing to throw out Star Trek based on red matter, where does that leave writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick? Are they really fantasy writers who ended up with the wrong team by mistake?

Philip Marchand on how fantasy took over science fiction [Afterword/National Post]

In the film, Christopher Plummer plays Dr. Parnassus, a traveling showman who, a thousand years ago made a deal with the Devil: Parnassus could live forever, but any children he had would become property of the Devil upon their sixteenth birthday. As Parnassus' daughter Valentina approaches her sixteenth birthday, the Devil returns to collect. Ledger plays Tony, a mysterious outsider who suddenly joins the troupe and arouses Parnassus' suspicions.

The trailer takes us inside Parnassus' Imaginarium, a magical mirror that transports people to strange and surreal worlds. We also get a look at Tony's transformations after Ledger's untimely death led to Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law being cast as Tony's additional forms. It's visually striking, to be sure, but we'll have to wait to see if it all adds up to a movie.

Angel Heart is dark urban fantasy at its most chicken-slaughteringly great. A hot, young Mickey Rourke plays detective Harry Angel, hired by a seriously Satanized Robert De Niro to find an elusive figure named Johnny Favourite. The more he hunts for Favourite, the creepier things get. De Niro luridly eats a hard boiled egg in front of him, and then he gets involved with a young voodoo priestess (Lisa Bonet) whose mother liked to drink blood with Favourite.

The movie is basically soaked in terrible stereotypes of everybody, from the "savage voodoo" types to the "ladies who like forced sex" types. Plus De Niro's hair in a bun. And there's a twist ending that is the sort of thing the demon spawn of Fritz Leiber and Philip K. Dick would scribble out in a darkened brothel basement while mainlining bug powder.

I could have shown you so many great scenes in this flick, but I decided what you really needed this weekend was a chance to see the Full Mickey in action with his voodoo lady. First they're just having sex, but then suddenly there's like blood, and scary feet, and scarier candles, and a horrifying washing lady, utterly terrifying elevators, and (gasp) orgies!!! Plus, seriously bad sex with Mickey. Iron Man could never top this.

Angel Heart via IMDB

io9: Do you see much distinction between being a musician and being a writer?

PB: Being a musician has always seemed like luxury to me, perhaps because I don't do it for a living. It's like Mark Twain's line that work consists of whatever a body's obliged to do, and play consists of what a body's not obliged to do. So I take music very seriously, but it's not my work in the same way that writing is. For me it's something of a vacation, something of a luxury. But that said, there are many similarities in the two things. There is so much about both which only has to do with structure. You have to say to yourself "Okay, this isn't working, so let's try it some other way." I've written entire stories in first person that needed to be rewritten in third person before they clicked, just the same way you might try a piece of music in a different key or on a different instrument to make it feel right. As you work you start saying to yourself "Maybe I can do that French thing of sliding back and forth between major and minor? Hey, I stole that chord progression from Brassens, so maybe I can steal this key change from Jimmy Reed?" When it comes down to doing it, there's always a right way, and I just have to find it.

Who do you enjoy listening to these days?

I'm not listening to a whole lot of music these days, for various reasons, but when I do it tends to be Django Reinhardt and people of that sort. Rex Stewart. Coleman Hawkins. Mostly older jazz.

What music inspires your writing?

I was always influenced one way or the other by French cabaret music, and jazz in general for its improvisational quality. I tend to think — I always have — in musical terms while I'm writing fiction. I'll think "This is definitely a horn section. This is definitely a string quartet." I really do think like that. I was very conscious of this when working on A Fine and Private Place. Everyone in that book was a different stringed instrument to me, and doing scenes with Michael and Mr. Rebeck and Laura and Campos, the cemetery guard, felt just like I was writing for a string quartet. I was very aware of voices and strings playing against each other.

You have cited authors like James Stephens, Lord Dunsany, James Thurber, and Edgar Pangborn as being influential to your decision to become a writer. What current authors do you admire today? In other word, read any good books lately?

There are old favorites like Charles de Lint, Patricia McKillip, and Robin McKinley. Ursula LeGuin, always. And then there are people I've never heard of before, people I've just stumbled on, like Michael Gruber. He's about my age and lives up in Seattle, and I don't know a thing more about him except that I'll read anything with his name on it. His erudition, his sense of proportion and characterization, are astonishing. Each book is different than the one before, which has always been an attraction for me since I try and do it in my own work. I was also delighted to discover, at the last convention I went to, that the mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky is a fan of mine, because I've been a great fan of his for years. Every now and then it's nice to find yourself in another mutual admiration society.

The author Robert Nathan, although successful and prolific is mainly remembered for only one novel, Portrait of Jennie. When The Last Unicorn came out he warned you that it would become "your Jennie". It seems that has been the case. Does it bug you that fans only know you for that book?

I've long since passed being tired of that particular way of looking at my work. As Robert also said, it's a lot better to be remembered for something than not to be remembered at all - he was grateful for Jennie. But this is an issue that doesn't take up a lot of my time. I like it when people discover the book from the movie, and I like it when people discover others of my books from that one. There's no way to predict it, and absolutely no sense in staying up nights with it. I just try and make the books different from each other because that's what is important to me.

Have you gotten a bit sick of unicorns, or do they still mean something wonderful to you?

It's a funny thing. I never did imagine I would take them on again, for a lot of reasons. But then I went and wrote a couple of stories involving unicorns - or things that call themselves unicorns, anyway - one of which, "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros," is my own favorite among my shorter pieces of fiction. And I wrote a YA book called The Unicorn Sonata which utterly vanished when the publisher went under, but which I'm going to bring back as a four-book series, probably starting next year. So they were still there, in a lesser kind of way. Then "Two Hearts" came along in 2005 and my unicorn, the unicorn, you might say, was back in my life. This one has inevitably led me to another novel, which will follow up on Sooz, to see what happens to her starting when she turns 17. That's how I find out about my characters: I write about them. There's an old saying in various languages that goes "You want to give God a good giggle? Make a plan." The Germans simply say "Man plans, God laughs." So I don't make plans that way any more. I have certain things I've agreed to do, and certain things I feel I have to do, but beyond those I never know what's going to come next, or what I'll be doing. Over the years I've usually been very surprised.

Could you comment about your current legal dispute with Granada Media over the animated film of The Last Unicorn ?

Very simply, making this as open and shut as I can, by the terms of my contract Granada owes me 5% of the profits from The Last Unicorn. Now, their first reaction when we asked to be paid back in 2003 was to claim that they didn't have to pay me anything because no one told them there were any active contracts when they bought the film. That was legally meaningless, and we told them so. Their next position was that they had bought the film out of bankruptcy, which meant they were not obligated to pay me anything I might have been owed from before their purchase. This is true enough, but not to any particular point, since of course I wasn't asking them to pay me for anything prior to their purchase. Just for my proper share of what they'd made. At that point they went silent and stonewalled until we posted the whole controversy on the web in 2005, asking for fan support. After they started getting complaint letters and faxes, in 2006 they came to yet a third position - that old Hollywood standby of claiming that the film was still in the red. In fact, their official line is that due to various accounting and contractual matters, the movie version of The Last Unicorn — which cost only $3 million to make in the early ‘80s — is now somehow $15 million in the hole, 27 years later. According to them it has never made a profit, despite all these years of good business, despite current cable deals in multiple countries, despite the fact that over 1.5 million DVDs have been sold worldwide in the past five years. Right now, 8,000 new DVDs of the film sell every week in North America through major retailers, and I get nothing from any of them. Not a cent. Only the copies people buy through Conlan Press make any money for me at all. It's rather frustrating. We're not done with the issue, though, and sooner or later I believe I'll win what I'm due. Regarding some things I'm very stubborn, and I've certainly got the facts and the law on my side.

I really enjoyed your recent stories inspired by your Jewish upbringing in the Bronx. Are you planning any more pieces in that vein?

It sounds like you're talking about "The Rabbi's Hobby," in Eclipse Two, and "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel," which came out in Strange Roads from Dreamhaven Books and is also in my latest collection, We Never Talk About My Brother. I didn't plan to do those at all, it's just the way they came into my head. And they were certainly fun to write, but I don't think you should expect to see any more rabbis in my work because I was not raised particularly observant, was never Bar Mitzvahed, and didn't know any rabbis on what you might call a professional basis. Well, maybe one more...my business manager told me once that the autocorrect in Word had changed his mistyping of "The Rabbi's Hobby" into "The Rabbi's Holiday," and that tickled me because the titular rabbi's name, Tuvim, means "holiday" in Hebrew. So I might yet write one about Rabbi "Holiday's" holiday. We'll see. If you liked those stories you might also like a series of seasonally-themed podcasts I've been doing for the Green Man Review. They aren't about being Jewish, but they are set in the Bronx of my childhood, and feature me and my friends from back then. One of those - -"The Stickball Witch" — shows up in print for the first time in Brother. There are four more, and sometime later this year I hope to see them collected in a single volume called Four Years, Five Seasons.

Would you consider doing a story using the Golem legend?

As a matter of fact, there's a novel I've been thinking about — the working title is Famous Monsters — that will feature a mild-mannered, very gentlemanly English actor who may very well be the Golem. Or my version, anyway. I'll have to see how it comes out.

Would that English actor be at all based on William Henry Pratt?

Yes. For some years now I've been thinking about doing a book based on the real-life friendship between Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi. Lon Chaney, Jr., and Peter Lorre...or, as they were actually named, William Henry Pratt, Béla Blaskó, Creighton Chaney, and László Löwenstein. None of them were really what they seemed; they were all so much more complex and interesting than the monstrous characters they played. And I got the notion that maybe there was yet another level to the four of them, and that's what I've been exploring ever since. There's a tremendous amount of research to be done on this one. And of course it takes place in Los Angeles at the end of the 1930s, right on the brink of World War Two. That's Raymond Chandler/Nathaniel West territory, they really own that, so I will have to try and write about that time as if I've never read either of them.

What can you tell us about some of your upcoming projects, especially novels like Summerlong , Sweet Lightning, and I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons?

They are all at various stages of work and rework. Summerlong needs one more cleanup pass, and some major rewriting of the last two chapters. I plan on being done with that by the end of April, so Conlan Press can bring out the hardcover this year, to be followed by a trade paperback edition from Tachyon Publications in 2010. This one has been a long time coming — I originally wrote it for Simon & Schuster back in 2001 and 2002, but the editor bounced my second draft because I didn't follow any of his suggestions. He meant well, to be sure, but they were all terrible suggestions. Not quite on par with insisting I put in sharks and terrorists — or terrorist sharks — but similarly unaware of what the story was actually meant to be doing. This one is fantasy of the sort that literary critics tend to call "magical realism," and it is set in and around modern-day Seattle.

I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons is completely different, and something of a rollercoaster: it starts out mostly lighthearted and funny, but turns rather dark and scary in the middle and in the end, well...I thought I'd never come back to playing with kings and princes and princesses, and certainly I never thought I would ever write an entire novel about dragons. But this story was too much fun to turn my back on. I hope readers will like it.

Sweet Lightning is the farthest from completion, because it is so personal for me. I'll be working on this one for a while. It's both a baseball fantasy — I love baseball, I always have — and a love letter to the Pittsburgh I discovered when I went to college there in the mid-1950s.

After those three are out of the way I've got the maybe-golem book to consider, the full sequel to The Last Unicorn, the four-volume Unicorn Sonata series...and those are just the novels on the to-do list. There are non-fiction books and children's books I'm working on, new poetry and song lyrics, several collections, old books to revise and bring back into print, maybe some theatre, lots of stories — over thirty finished in the last two years, including three new Schmendrick stories. I'm still not quite sure how I happened to become a prolific short fiction writer at my advanced and supposedly set-in-my-ways age, but there they are, with more on the way. And I'm definitely getting back to occasionally performing live as a guitarist and singer, after having so much fun doing shows with my old friend Phil Sigunick in upstate New York last summer. As George Burns liked to joke, "I can't die, I'm booked!"

The simple fact is that I've been working at this for over 50 years, and I'm still not getting it right. But I do think I'm getting closer.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to Peter S. Beagle as Christopher Hsiang. He is deeply grateful for Mr. Beagle's time and that of Connor Cochran, his business manager. Chris really looks forward to reading Famous Monsters - squee!

Beagle is most well known for two classic novels written at the very beginning of his career, neither of which have ever been out of print. The Last Unicorn is probably his most famous and beloved, but I feel A Fine and Private Place is the better book-a truly timeless classic. He continues to attract faithful fans with his wit, charm and powerful writing in novels like Tansin, The Innkeeper's Song, and the collection The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche . Did I mention he also wrote the "Sarek" episode of Star Trek: TNG? Yeah, that one.

Reading the recent "Rabbi's Holiday" in Eclipse Two (Night Shade Books) I thought, "Wow, the guy's just getting better!" It would stand to reason that any talented author would naturally improve with age like fine wine. Sadly, this is not always the case; every reader knows that particular heartbreak. But Beagle will not disappoint you. The nineteen-year-old summer camp counselor who wrote A Fine and Private Place has been at his craft for half a century now and the work has really paid off.

"Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel" is inspired by Beagle's own New York Jewish childhood touched by a divine presence both quirky and commanding. The wonderfully drawn family portraits are as warm and satisfying as a big plate of latkes. A companion piece to the aforementioned "Rabbi's Holiday", I adore these.

The narrative voice shifts effortlessly on the title track "We Never Talk About My Brother". A blue-collar regular Joe has a family secret and a very good reason for keeping it. Visceral? There's a line on the eighteenth page that felt like a blow to my solar plexus. After that it just gets intense, like Kingdom Come intense.

"The Tale of Junko and Sayuri": Reminiscent of both Neil Gaiman's Dream Hunters from Sandman and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, it uses the common folktale motif of the Animal Wife with a nice twist. Rediscover that uneasy feeling when the person you love turns out to be not who what they seem.

"King Pelles the Sure" wants to give his happy prosperous nation the only thing it has ever lacked, a war. This quick cappricio keeps a somber counterpoint to create a great anti-war fable. There is in no way any allegory of any recent historical events. It should be added to Elementary school curricula everywhere.

Medical science is baffled by "The Last and Only, or Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French". With no where else to turn, a middle-aged couple must come to grips with the husband's complete and inexorable slide into foreignness. An inventively original farce that is also a deep commentary on identity and loss.

I couldn't help but think of Dan Ackroyd while reading "Spook", especially his role in Ghostbusters and as Leonard Pinth-Garnell on SNL. It has vengeance from beyond the grave and the Worst Poems to be found in the most foetid, blackest pits of the English Language. Guess which one is more horrifying.

"The Stickball Witch" returns back to the old neighborhood and that one house all the kids were scared of. This and the next story are previously unpublished. To my mind they are the weakest in the book being merely good. The description of the old lady here is picture-perfect.

"By Moonlight" a haunted man recounts his time in the land of Faery. Bittersweet and authentic to the period and the classic folklore, this piece is satisfying but not terribly original. It's more like an old song everyone in the pub sings along to.

As the first story is told by a young boy it is fitting that the narrator of "Chandail" is an old storyteller. Lal recounts her relationship with a sea monster with uncanny powers and with her own painful memories. This is set in the same world as Beagle's novel The Innkeeper's Song. I have not read it but is definitely going on my list.

The first half of the collection are the strongest of the stories but each one is a beautiful song, each with it's own voice and tone. Beagle plays the classic themes of love and death, sacrifice and self-discovery like a master. Never clichéd, he pulls out new riffs and vamps on the expected conventions of modern fantasy, even the ones he helped create in the first place. With just the right notes he can describe an entire room, the people in it and the mood, all in a few perfect sentences. Pure poetry. Beagle is an American bard: He makes the tough guys weep and all the girls sigh.

We Never Talk About My Brother via Tachyon Books

Grey_Area is known among the unicorns as Christopher Hsiang. He means you no harm - he's just here for the books.

Bell and Vallejo have worked singly or together on everything from this famous Barbarella poster and Conan comics, to Heavy Metal Magazine covers and ESPN ads. Their iconic fantasy cheesecake style is instantly recognizable, and the best part is that they're unafraid to parody themselves. (They also did this cool Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film poster.)

For inspiration in creating this commissioned work, Bell and Vallejo read Burroughs' The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. Burroughs wrote 11 novels in his series about the planet that Martians refer to as "Barsoom." Here you can see Carter and his lady Martian friend fighting some of the multi-armed savages that inhabit Barsoom.

Though Pixar's Andrew Stanton just began work on a John Carter movie, based on the first novel A Princess of Mars (1911), I'm afraid this amazing illustration is not concept art for that film.

John Carter Painting via Paint and Brush