Jen Miller

A few semesters ago, I was teaching a course in modern fiction.  It was a fun class to teach, since the term "modern fiction" was broad enough that I could include a lot of my own personal favorites on the syllabus.  And so we did some David Mitchell, some detective stories, and of course, some science fiction and fantasy.

We started our "playing with reality" unit with a text many of them had already read--Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

They hated it.

Ahhh, September!  That time of year when a young person's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of....pencils.  Backpacks.  Homework.  School!

Many of us who write for Fantasy Matters are educators, and so the beginning of a new school year is always exciting for us.  We love the potential of new classes, the excitement of creating new syllabi, and the possibility of new conversations, new understandings, and new ideas.

That's why we're celebrating "Back to School" this week!

To celebrate the start of our series on key episodes of Dr. Who, we're featuring Dr. Who-themed fun this Friday!  For starters, here is this fun shirt available over at Woot! that brings two great time-travellers together into the same place in space AND time:

Some other fun Dr. Who links we found for you this week:

Today we are launching a new series called "The Keys to the TARDIS," in which people write about the parts of the BBC show Doctor Who that they think are somehow key to the series.  "Key" can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways--key to the narrative, key to a certain character's development, key to personal understanding, key to the overall conception of the show.  We'll post a new installment each Friday, and we'd love to know what you think, too, so make sure to post your own choices in the comments. 

In this first installment, Jen Miller writes about how "The Christmas Invasion" episode in between Series 1 and 2 of the reboot changed her thinking about the nature of the Doctor. 

I'm new to Doctor Who.  I just started watching this summer, and I started watching the show from when it picked back up in 2005, rather than from the very beginning.  Not only that, but I haven't caught up to the current episode of Doctor Who, either.  I'm not even close--I only just started watching the episodes with Martha Jones as the 10th Doctor's companion.  All of this is a very long way of saying: I'm not an expert on Doctor Who, and this essay shouldn't be read as an analysis of the series as a whole.

Rather, this essay is a look at one episode that changed the way I thought about the Doctor, and thus changed the way I watched the show. 

This essay is about "The Christmas Invasion."

Earlier this week, Tia Mansouri wrote about the new cover of Roald Dahl's classic children's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a closer look at the cover made me think about other, similar artwork--in particular, comics that use simply drawn characters to tell their stories.

As Tia mentions in her article, one of the reasons the new cover is able to portray most of the major goings-on in the novel is because of these simple lines.  They keep the drawing looking uncluttered, thus allowing the image to contain more details from the book.