omenGamers.com shatters stereotypes about gamers, proving that yes, women game and yes, they can kick butt. The site's hefty "Reviews/Previews" section runs the gamut from Campaign Cartographer 2 (a
mapping program for pen-and-paper RPGs) to Final Fantasy X to Twisted Metal: Black, covering all of the major gaming genres in the process.
Each review gives the standard blow-by-blow analysis of the game, but provide a feminine tweak with a "Marketing Efforts Towards Women" section. This section analyzes the game's appeal (or lack thereof) to women gamers, including the effectiveness of female characters, how they stack up against their male counterparts and how scantily dressed they are. There's also a discussion of any overtly sexist themes.
The reviews are decent, but the site's special sections are its true strength. In "Digital Women," the site profiles famous female characters from gaming such as Zelda (Legend of Zelda), Mara Jade (Star Wars) and Elayna Sedai (Wheel of Time). The profiles give an overview of a character and then rate her on based on intelligence, stance, look, attitude and other attributes.
Even better is the "Interviews" section, where the site speaks to some of the leading female—and occasionally male—game designers in the video game industry. It has interviews with Roberta Williams of King's Quest fame and Karen McLarney of Guardians of Order, an RPG company.
— Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week—August 26, 2002
he first grandmaster of science fiction is given the royal treatment at the Robert A. Heinlein Home Page, a site dedicated to chronicling its namesake's life and work.
The site's first and largest section, "Archives," is divided into three categories: "Reference Documents," "Essays and Articles" and "Multimedia." A detailed frequently-asked-questions list tops the first category, answering questions about the author's military service, his marriages (including his little-known first wife), his numerous pseudonyms, the three pre-World War II short stories he called the "stinkeroos," and much more. Other references include "Published Heinlein," which is a list of the author's work divided into short stories, novels and other formats, as well as the more exhaustive "New Heinlein Opus List" that includes every Heinlein publication and its various iterations.
The Essays category offers a few gems examining the nature of "federal service" in Heinlein's oft-debated Starship Troopers, as well as a look at what went wrong (and right) with the big-screen adaptation of his book The Puppetmasters. Rounding out the Archives, the
multi-media category has a handful of rare audio clips of Heinlein speaking during a 1980 radio interview, as well as shots of Martian and lunar craters named for the grandmaster.
The Links section offers just over a dozen links to other Heinlein sites, along with detailed descriptions of what visitors will find on them. Rounding out the site is a new feature: An evolving critique of longtime Heinlein critic/chronicler Alexei Panshin, who wrote the 1968 book Heinlein in Dimension. It's a work in progress with much left to be done, but worth bookmarking for future visits.
— Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week—August 19, 2002
cience fiction's slow and steady creep into academia is chronicled by Science Fiction Studies, the Web site for a print publication of the same name that has been turning a critical eye toward the genre since 1973.
While other publications review science fiction, the journal is dedicated to critiquing the reviewers. Its staff dissects the critical work of those analyzing fantasy, science fiction and horror literature, offering assessments of the author's academic skill, methodology and merit. The books reviewed are as diverse as science fiction itself, with topics ranging from feminism to post-modernism to good old-fashioned heroics.
Augmenting the reviews are tables of contents for all of the published journals, as well as synopses of the articles that appeared in each edition. If an edition sold out, its complete text is available online. There are also numerous essays on special topics, such as Brian Stableford's "The Third Generation of Genre SF."
The site's "Chronological Bibliography of Science Fiction Criticism" is an immense list of influential or noteworthy sci-fi critiques spanning the ages from 1634 to 2002. The "Wormholes" section isn't nearly as comprehensive, but does include hyperlinks to numerous speculative fiction journals, newsletters, library collections and scholarly organizations.
The academic style of the site's holdings can be a little dense, and it does require a mental shifting of gears to view science fiction as something to be critically studied rather than simply enjoyed. Overall, it's an excellent resource for anyone who's ever struggled to write a critical analysis of Clarke and Asimov while their peers tackled more terrestrial subjects such as Shakespeare and Hemingway.
— Ken Newquist
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