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Five SFF Road Trip Stories to Feed Your Wanderlust

Fri May 20, 2022 9:00am 21 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Photo: Nicolas Moscarda [via Unsplash]

To my mind, a road trip is not an exodus or a flight from danger. It can start with one of those things but only transcends to “road trip” status when the danger is over, and the participants are looking for the next thing. Road trips are exploratory and often recreational, more ‘let’s see what’s around the next bend’ and less ‘if we don’t keep moving, we’ll have to eat grandpa.’

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Hunger — Fickle and Radical: Claire Kohda’s Woman, Eating

Thu May 19, 2022 3:00pm Post a comment 1 Favorite [+]

Lydia is just another twenty-something year old living in London. Fresh out of art school and trying to hazard a trajectory through the world, she finally washes her hands of her mother, who’s in ailing mental health, by committing her to a home in Margate. She nabs an internship at a prestigious gallery, the OTA, rents a studio in a collective artists’ space and wills herself to refine her aesthetic practice. She yearns for community, but more often than not finds herself alone, scrolling food videos on Youtube. So far so familiar. Only there’s a catch. Lydia is a vampire.

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Secrets and Lies — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Ghosts of Illyria”

Thu May 19, 2022 1:00pm 77 comments 4 Favorites [+]
Image: CBS

Back in 1989, D.C. Fontana—who was the story editor for most of the original series’ first two seasons, the show-runner for the animated series, the uncredited co-creator of TNG, and who wrote for all those shows as well as one DS9 episode, many of which were excellent and influential episodes—wrote a Trek novel called Vulcan’s Glory. It took place prior to “The Cage” (and retroactively, shortly after the Short Trek “Q & A“), and chronicled Spock’s first mission on the Enterprise.

It also established that Number One was a genetically engineered human from the colony of Illyria, a backstory that was used in several other works of tie-in fiction (notably 2010’s The Children of Kings by David Stern and 2016’s Legacies trilogy by David Mack, Greg Cox, and Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore).

Said backstory has now been incorporated into the onscreen canon, with an interesting twist…

[I welcome that conversation.]

Wilderness and Survival in R.L. Stine’s The Overnight and Carol Ellis’s Camp Fear 

Thu May 19, 2022 12:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

Sometimes getting back to nature can be a perfect break from the day-to-day demands and stressors of modern life: the wind in the trees, stars overhead, fresh air, maybe an invigorating hike or a cozy night spent around a campfire. For the protagonists of ‘90s teen horror novels, the wilderness offers this escape, as well as a chance to get out from under the constant surveillance of their parents and (to a lesser extent) away from the social stratification of their communal peer group. However, while the high school hallways of teen horror are wild enough, the great outdoors holds its own set of challenges and dangers. The teens in R.L. Stine’s The Overnight (1989) and Carol Ellis’s Camp Fear (1993) venture into the woods and find a whole new set of horrors. 

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Vivid and Erratic Storytelling: All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay

Thu May 19, 2022 11:00am 3 comments Favorite This

My first foray into Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing has been one of the most artful instances of unintentional edging I’ve had in a long time. In theory, All the Seas of the World is an easy sell, with real-world historical inspirations, and an elaborate pirate setting (I do love Black Sails) done in what the publisher describes as his signature “quarter turn to the fantastic” style. Kay is best known for these types of historical fantasies—dramatic fiction that draws from defining eras of past centuries, encompassing everything from a reimagined Tang Dynasty to a range of alternate medieval Europes. All the Seas of the World follows the same formula against a backdrop of religious war and seafaring corsair culture with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavors.

Actually getting through Seas was, at turns, gripping and frustrating. For historical fantasies of this scope—the kind of far-reaching stories that flit across oceans and kingdoms and mention ten names in one breath—the first few chapters are often a rude baptism of worldbuilding, jargon, and geography that really takes time to sink in. Generally speaking, getting accustomed to this particular kind of historical genre is an acquired taste, as well as an acquired skill in learning to move along without getting overwhelmed by the frequency and volume of details and stylistic shifts.

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