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Peter Mohrbacher works as a concept artist, illustrator, and Art Lead for projects such as Magic: The Gathering and Dragons of Atlantis. His art has been featured in Spectrum annuals 18, 19, and 20. He lives in San Francisco. His website is www.vandalhigh.com.
I’ve always been drawn to genre mash-ups, I think, because they’re a way to honor traditional tropes and yet cast them in a new light, to essentially play tropes off against one another. For me, the western has always been one of the most adaptable—it works well with fantasy, horror, or even science fiction. For me personally, there’s just something about many of those western tropes that appeals to me.
I was honestly surprised the first time someone asked me what crimes the prisoners in “Deep End” had committed and then wondered why I hadn’t named these offences. Where I come from, imprisonment is largely a given for huge percentages of the population. Whatever one has done doesn’t matter much—punishment is based more on WHO ONE IS.
We have original science fiction by Seth Dickinson (“A Tank Only Fears Four Things”) and Sandra McDonald (“Selfie”), along with SF reprints by Nisi Shawl (“Deep End”) and Sean Williams (“Zero Temptation”). Plus, we have original fantasy by Matthew Hughes (“The Ba of Phalloon,” a Kaslo Chronicles tale) and Fred Van Lente (“Willful Weapon”), and fantasy reprints by Rachel Pollack (“Burning Beard”) and Rajan Khanna (“Second Hand”). All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with a pair of feature interviews. For our ebook readers, we also have the novella reprint “Shiva in Shadow” by Nancy Kress and novel excerpts from DEFENDERS by Will McIntosh and THE SILK MAP by Chris Willrich.
A midrash is a story created about characters or events of the Bible, sort of filling in gaps in the text with creative imagination. The original rabbis considered these divinely revealed, and the stories were usually pious. I prefer a modern sensibility and ideas that challenge traditional pieties.
We live in a society that fetishizes military hardware. It’s on movie posters, in our games, our bestselling books. There are discussion forums full of people arguing whether this plane could outfight that one. And I totally understand this: I think it’s the same psychological engine that brings people into Pokémon, or bird watching, or sports.
Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to difficult films. From his hallucinatory feature debut PI to his metaphysical triptych fantasy THE FOUNTAIN, his cinematic worlds are often a hopeless personal struggle against overwhelming, even cosmic odds. The other theme to which he most often returns is that of all-consuming passion (be it ballet or wrestling, or—if you want to give in and get really dark—addiction).
As a lover of horror fiction, I’ve always said that fear is the strongest human emotion, but it’s not. Grief is. If you ever felt lovesick, you know what I mean. When it happened to me, I curled up on the couch literally for weeks.
What we’re looking at here is the power of the neutral position: the right to stand in for all people, to be “everyman.” From the neutral position, you can experience the whole range of human emotion and possibility, and you can communicate your experience to others. You’re the myth-maker; you create the story of the world. In implying that only white actors can do this, Handel’s saying the opposite of what he thinks he’s saying. He’s saying that the race of the individuals does matter. It matters enormously. It matters so much that Noah wound up with an all-white cast.
The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot”; Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness; I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional. I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner.
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