The Wind Through the Keyhole, while set within Stephen King’s original 7 volume Dark Towerepic, has little to do with the series. Another words, it’s a small off ramp within the franchise that neither adds nor -more importantly- subtracts from the other volumes. King himself, in his forward, calls it book 4.5 (set between volumes four and five). It is also, in some ways, a gate-way book into the series for people who’ve never read them.While some might hope to spend more time with Roland, Susannah, Eddie, Jake and Oy, they only become bookends to the novel, as it takes a structure of a story within a story.  The...

Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness explores a world populated by ambisexuals: humanoids that are each male and female. On the planet Winter, people are androgynous except when in kemmer, essentially translated as ‘in heat.’ Their sexual cycle runs around 28 days, like the female menstrual cycle. For around 21 days, the people are both and neither sex. Once in kemmer, their sex is determined mutually with their partner. They become masculine or feminine for the length of a menstrual period: about five days. This ability to switch sex, to be both male and female, makes Winter a planet without war. The novel poses the idea of war...

A poster on Deadline.com summed it up perfectly: “Note to Hollywood: This is what happens when you let comic fans do comic book movies. Joss Whedon knocked it out of the park. The right mix of humor without camp, special effects without over usage, and action with good script. Having actors who like and/or know the characters doesn’t hurt either.” I’m guessing now, with a record breaking $207 million domestic gross, and $659 million world-wide take, no one will question (too much) of Whedon’s style of writing. In 2010, when Marvel’s studio head Avi Arad and Stan Lee announced that Joss Whedon would write and direct The Avengers, the...

Selling tickets to a comic book convention is the last place organizers expected to encounter anti-gay hate groups and their allies. That’s exactly, though, what Bent-Con, the gay pop culture festival that celebrates LGBTQ contributions to the science fiction, fantasy, horror, comic book and gaming genres, did. They did so in an obscure and arcane area of the internet most people aren’t familiar with: credit card payment processing gateways, lynchpins of internet transactions the world over. “Honestly, it was something I wasn’t even expecting,” Bent-Con President Sean Holman said. “When you think about hate groups, you think of them with regards to anti-marriage efforts or against serving openly in...