The Big Idea

I happened to see Star Wars, The Last Jedi yesterday in a very clean and inexpensive theater in Monterrey, Mexico (just here for a short time this trip). Watching a moving in the United States increasingly seems like a waste of money, but I digress from my point...which is commentary on the movie itself. While I am going to commit some SPOILERS they will be of a general nature. I am not going to reveal how the story ends or some of the key bits of information the tale gives out. I do share some story details, but deliberately out of context. And while this is also a general review, I am going to focus on one aspect of the story that caught my attention that may not be the first thing most people think of with this movie. Note that I had several problems with Episode Seven that I hoped this movie would not repeat. I felt The Force Awakens 1) copied far too much from the Star Wars A New Hope, 2) presented an insufficiently powerful villain in Kylo Ren, 3) an over-powered new chara...

Last week I traveled to the Guadalajara Book Fair, one of the largest book fairs in the world and the largest in Latin America from what I've heard. I attended a number of events and looked around the entire grounds, but only in Guadalajara for four out of nine days of the fair. I did this with a specific purpose in mind. As an Evangelical Christian who writes science fiction and fantasy, who speaks Spanish and French proficiently and who has a Mexican wife, I was looking at the prospects of selling Christian-themed speculative fiction in Latin America. Some things I wanted to know included: 1. Are any Christian publishers already selling speculative fiction in Latin America? 2. Is any speculative fiction being sold at all at the fair? And if so, by which authors? Published by whom? 3. Factor X. What might I learn at the fair that I don't even know could be possible? Probably I spent the most time on point number 2 . I don't know how many books were on sale at the fair...