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Our Lady of the Dark Country

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Sylvia Linsteadt

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“he ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles said that two forces – love and hate – govern the universe. Love fuses things together. Hate splits them apart. In a foundation myth of ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was killed by his brother Set, and his body cut into many pieces and scattered across Egypt. His wife collected all of the dismembered parts together and then, with the help of Anubis, the god of embalming and funerary rites, and Thoth, the god of magic, she restored Osiris’s body to life. This is a creation myth based on fission – the god is torn apart – followed by fusion – the god is reassembled. Dr. Frankenstein, the modern Thoth, the scientific Thoth, fused body parts of dead criminals together then animated the creature. Human society is full of fusion forces that bring people together, and fission forces that break them apart. Fusion forces unite. Fission forces divide. We now live in a Fission Phase, with extreme polarization evident everywhere. There’s no sign of any Fusion Phase coming to the rescue any time soon.”

PhilosophyMythologyFusionFrankensteinFissionOsirisThothEmpedocles
Book:Fusions Versus Fissions: Are You a Joiner or a Splitter?
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“«I'll never forget you, Crest.» «You couldn't even if you wanted to.» That sarcastic tilt to their mouth is back. And they're right. I could never forget them, and I'll never want to. «I love you,» I whisper. «I wish I could hear you say that forever. Keep it in a shell to press to my ear and listen to for the rest of my life.» «Can you do that? With your mer magic?» Crest shakes their head, then taps their temple. «But I'll keep it here.» I tap my chest, right over my heart. «And I'll keep you here.»”

RomanceFictionFantasyGayYoung AdultMythologyContemporaryLgbtQueerMermaids
Book:Out of the Blue
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“Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.”

FantasyScience FictionMythologyDragonsInterviewMidwestVirginia WoolfJungian PsychologyMale MenopauseThe Onion
Author:Terry Pratchett
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“You're still drunk on the stories you learned at your father’s knee, stories from a world that has passed away. But Leofric was the last gasp of a dying age. The Norman spike has driven itself deep into this soil. They have settled in the country and populated the towns, built fortresses and governed shires. They have left our brightest and best in a smoldering heap, from which the smoke can never more be gathered. We cannot expect to raise the stalk back up again when it has been ground into feed.”

MythologyHistorical FictionLegendsRobin Hood
Book:Saplings of Sherwood
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