Saturday 19 March 2011

Expanding review activities

Recently we've been keeping my eye open for opportunities to expand our reviewing activities beyond books and magazines, while keeping our focus on speculative and weird fiction and the small and independent press.

Just in case anyone's listening and might have review items to offer, some of the areas that have occured to us recently are:
  1. Young Adult/children's literature: the crossover between genre publications and YA novels is strong (see previous post), and I feel that titles in this area need to be reviewed with a focus on their intended audience, rather than just as "lightweight" specfic;
  2. Interactive fiction: there's a growing medium of interactive fiction in e-books (with iPad apps receiving the most attention); a book that you interact with rather than just reading is a good part of the way toward being a computer game, and I think both deserve the attention of speculative readers and reviewers;
  3. Performance: we're very keen to feature occasional reviews of local theatre productions, interpretive dance, or whatever else might class as "performance" with a speculative element.
Do you publish/produce/perform in any of these areas? Do you review these kinds of works? Do you have any suggestions for publishers/producers we should get in touch with to ask for review copies? Any other neglected areas you think we should be looking into? Please let us know.