Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 -Graphic Story

What happens when SFF fans nominate comic books for an award? Usually I would say you get fewer superhero titles and more SFF, but this year fully half the titles contain avengers, though not the avengers you are thinking of. Also, I love comic books, but I have no knack for visual criticism, so I apologise in advance to both readers and artists if my art criticism boils down to “it looked pretty”.

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Review – The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In the current climate it is very easy to focus on the big picture of the Handmaid’s tale: a take over of the US by religious fanatics leads to the wholesale oppression of women. This would however, be a disservice to what is an incredibly personal tale. At its heart, this is a book about what happens when you treat people as things, and what people in that position will do to survive. By focusing the story down to one person, the misogyny in the Handmaid’s tale expands beyond its setting to stand in for the depredations leveled against women in the past, present, and most distressingly, the future.

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