Zombies Versus Unicorns, Part Deux

In an earlier post, we reported on the ongoing feud between zombies and unicorns, but recently things have gotten out of hand. What was once a small skirmish restrained within the civilized and intangible discourse of blog posts and YouTube videos, has now escalated into book form with the announcement of the upcoming anthology, Zombies Versus Unicorns, edited by Justine Larbalestier (pro-zombie) and Holly Black (pro-unicorn). The collection will be published in 2010 and feature about half zombie stories and half unicorn stories, plus one story in which the supernatural competitors battle it out AVP style***. According to Ms. Larbalestier, the line-up of writers is composed of "more best-sellers, award winners, and all-round geniuses than you can poke a stick at."

It's all enough to make one wonder if, perhaps, this long-running feud on the interweb wasn't a very clever bit of advertising. But then again, it's not all that hard to imagine such arguments taking place as I know my friends and I have argued over similar matters, such as the great Ninja Vs. Robot feud of '98 which resulted in the loss of a good friend's ear. In any case, I'm excited about this anthology. Despite i09's concerns over the difficulty of "keep[ing] zombies fresh" (oh, the beauty of unintentional puns) or the lack of unicorns in contemporary science fiction or urban fantasy, it seems to me that there are plenty of cool metaphorical and narrative possibilities out there for aspiring writers. Nazi snow zombies in Norway, anyone?


***Two things of note. One, I've never actually seen AVP. Two, I have no idea if such a story exists, or will ever exist. But wouldn't it be cool?

For the Weekend

Dear readers, it's Friday and it's a new world, but people still seem to die a lot.

Here's some stuff to look at this weekend.

John Leonard: editor, critic, sentence exploder, and person I've never read but may now become obsessed with, has died. Matthew Cheney at the Mumpsimus, along with Edward Champion and Salon, have written wonderful tributes.

In the young adult world, few feuds engender more passion and lost friendships than the one between zombies and unicorns. John Green has more.

Amazon has announced it's Best Books of 2008, which is funny considering, you know, there's still a couple months left, but I guess the "best of" year is kind of like the "fiscal" year in that it ends somewhere around October. Top ten lists include: Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Mysteries and Thrillers, and Romance, among others. It occurred to me to comment on the fact that there's one category called, "Fiction and Literature," and then a bunch of other categories, a demarcation that seems to imply that the other categories are neither fiction nor literature, but then I got lazy and decided just to comment on the thought of commenting.

Sometimes women writers choose, or are asked, to hide the fact that they don't have man parts. It's a topic this blog mentioned once before. Io9 has a list of "Women Who Pretended to be Men to Publish SciFi Books", a list which includes the likes of JK Rowling and the ever-present James Tiptree, JR. who, as it turned out, was neither a James, a Tiptree, or a Jr.

Enjoy the weekend. Say hello to a squirrel.