Saturday, February 25, 2017

Six top Shakespearean SFF retellings

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Kelly Anderson tagged six top Shakespearean sci-fi & fantasy retellings, including:
The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer

It’s not surprising to find that The Tempest, the weirdest and most experimental of Shakespeare’s plays, has inspired a lot of SFF-nal takes. In this one, the play is retold aboard a zeppelin, floating forever above a vast modern city, holding a single prisoner—the greeting card writer Harold Winslow. He spends his time writing his memoirs, with only the voice of the woman he loved, Miranda, for company. Oh, and also the cryogenically frozen body of her father Prospero. In this isolated atmosphere, Harold tells us the story of his life. This one madly mixes genres, from steampunk, to alt-history, to postmodernism, all crammed into one very sad, very weird zeppelin. Approach it like the novel of ideas and experimentation it is and you might find yourself lost in its potential.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue