August IROSF

The August issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction has a nice variety of articles: Cheryl Morgan writes about awards, Christopher Garcia offers a strangely touching memoir of a fanzine-that-might-have-been, Mahesh Raj Mohan writes about Comic-Con, and Robert R. Shelsky gives advice to writers who are using Medieval towns as settings for their stories and novels. There's also an editorial from John Frost and reviews and criticism of short fiction, a Borderlands novel, and the recent film The Village.

If you read nothing else, be sure to read the interview with Clive Barker, wherein Barker talks with Brett Alexander Savory about writing, painting, filmmaking, BDSM (bondage & discipline/domination & submission/sadism & masochism ... that ought to bring some interesting Google hits here...), Quentin Tarrantino, etc. Here's a sample:
It's very important to me to, when I can, lend my voice, whether it's a fictional voice or whether it's a voice being used in a public forum, to say something in support of those who, in some way or other, are outcasts, to empower people in what is essentially a predominately white-built, male-built power structure -- and a predominately straight-built power structure. And the fight isn't over. We haven't won. There are still churches breeding hatred and division; there is still the Reverend Phelps going to the funerals of gay people, and people who died of AIDS, and carrying posters saying that they're dying and suffering in Hell. We haven't won the war against the inhumane and cruel and the heartless, and the elements that exist in our culture -- the extremists who rot what is good in our belief system by pushing their own particularly corrupt codes, their excuses for their own prejudice. And I want to be useful. Every artist wants to be useful. I want to have an effect; more than anything I want to have an effect.

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