Humans tend to be central to fantasy stories. It is unusual for the point of view character to be of a different race. There are notable...

“Double, d mething wicked this way comes.” This line, stated by the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is possibly the most famous...

After fourteen weeks, we have finally arrived at the end of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pirates of Venus. A milestone. Yet the journey isn’t...

Warfare is a constant of human history. Rarely, if ever, has there not been some armed conflict going on somewhere in the world. Most of...

A story many of us are familiar with: “As a distant planet was destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a hastily...

It seems like just about everything has a warning label on it these days. Here’s an example from a shipping bag. Warning: To avoid danger...

World War II ended in a huge bang. Most explosively, the detonation of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With the surrender of...

Fantasy tales, especially those aimed at children, have often been designed to teach life lessons. They show the worst possible outcome...

The stock market crash of October 24, 1929, heralded the beginning of the Great Depression. Worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) was...

T.S. Elliot famously said “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” Elliot was not condoning plagiarism in the least. What he was...

In 1882, Frank Munsey launched a children’s magazine titled The Golden Argosy. He used a steam printing press to ink the pages, which...

Fairies, in modern-day stories, have more in common with Tinkerbell from Walt Disney’s Peter Pan than anything else. They’re portrayed as...

To be continued…” How many of us have seen these words at the end of a story? Maybe you’ve seen it in a television episode. But in a book...

Two weeks ago, we started with an overview of what the blog would be about. Last week we looked at the historical cost of books. This...

“We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.” LeVar Burton, on creating the Reading Rainbow iPad app. We live in a...

Take a moment to think about the science fiction and fantasy media you have access to. It probably took longer than only a moment,