News and Views on Fantasy
Mike Duran at Novel Journey gave his selection of Ten Best Book Covers. Interesting to note that George Bryan Polivka‘s The Legend of the Firefish made the list. Wayne Thomas Batson‘s Isle of the Sword was a runner up, as was R. K. Mortenson‘s Landon Snow and the Actor’s Riddle.
Speaking of George Bryan Polivka, Sally Stuart reports at Christian Writers’ Marketplace that Bryan’s acquiring editor at Harvest House, Nick Harrison, is a finalist for the Golden Scroll Award for editor of the year!
A friend of mine clipped an article from the January issue of Christian Institute Journal entitled “The Trouble with Harry: Authors Weigh in on the Potter Debate and Alternative Stories.” While not drawing a conclusion, the news item explored the diverse views among Christians regarding Harry Potter in particular, and fantasy in general. The article quoted at some length from Sharon Hinck (The Sword of Lyric, NavPrsss) and Bryan Davis (Dragons in Our Midst, AmG; Beyond Reflection’s Edge, Zondervan) in support of fantasy.
Sharon refused to side one way or the other when asked about Harry Potter. Bryan did not condemn the books for their fantasy elements but took a hard line regarding the sinful actions of the main characters
Interestingly, the article itself led me to one of the best anecdotal supports for speculative fiction I’ve read, a piece entitled “Fantasy and Faith” by Sally Thomas at First Things: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life.
Here’s a quote or two to whet your appetite:
I devoured those novels [A Wrinkle in Time and its first sequel, A Wind in the Door] even as I devoured the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, not because they satisfied my inchoate yearning for something beyond the world I knew, but because they stoked it.
And this:
As a child, raised on a relatively secular diet of mainstream Protestantism and utterly unaware of the existence of any theological problem beyond being mean to somebody on the playground, I was captivated by the notion that there was such a thing as evil and, conversely, that there was such a thing as good. The idea, further, that even the weak and the flawed were called to the battle—that there even was a battle—roused something in my imagination that years of Sunday School had somehow failed to touch.
