Marvin Kaye (www.marvinkaye.com) is the author of 15 novels, 6 nonfiction books, several plays & play adaptations, and editor of more than 30 fantasy, mystery and theatre anthologies, for which he won the 2005 World Fantasy Award as best anthologist. Currently editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Marvin is a native of Philadelphia, but currently lives in New York, where he is (retired) Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at NYU.

We are fortunate to include “Marvin Kaye’s Nth Dimension” column as a regular, exclusive feature of the Space and Time website. Enjoy!

The Horror Film That I Hate The Most (October 2009)

When I was a boy, my regular Saturday babysitter was the Haverford movie theater across North 60th Street from my father’s West Philadelphia radio repair shop. (There was one TV in the store, a small-screen test model that none of the family paid attention to. I asked Dad what it was. He said, “It’s a radio, except you see the people talking.”)

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The Yessense of Nonsen¢e (June 2009)
I’m not related to Danny Kaye, but he was my first “anti-establishment” hero. The establishment was the world of grownups. I am the youngest of four siblings, separated from the next eldest by nine years. My early life at times seemed governed by a household of real and substitute parents, and that entailed an abundance of negatives: no-no, uh-uh, and lots of other expressions calculated to close off, curtail, deny, rule out, shut down, set limits, and when combined with the economic strictures of post-Depression America, it is no wonder that to this day I have difficulty granting myself permission to do things that are not utilitarian, unless it has been disguised under the heading of “doing something for someone else.”
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I’m Just Wild About Y.A.! (March 2009)
I learned about the wonders of YA - Young Adult - literature when my daughter Terry was a grade school student in Manhattan. I became a volunteer at the school’s library, and between there and the ads she’d bring home from Scholastic Books, I discovered that some of the best writing in American letters is being done in the YA field. Later, I became involved with BookPals, an organization of professional actors who read in public schools around the country; through them I also encountered splendid children’s books, but this month I want to focus on YA because I suspect it escapes the notice of too many establishment book critics. Read the Rest …

Harry, Frodo and the Force (January 2009)
Ads for three new science fiction films appeared the same week in 1951 in Philadelphia newspapers, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, it was the first golden age of fantasy cinema (I regard SF as a subcategory of fantasy). That is perhaps unfair to prior film classics such as Metropolis, Nosferatu, or Things to Come, and one might well regard the horrific output of Val Lewton as a Golden Age in itself, but I merely cite personal opinion. For me, the first golden age began in 1951 with the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still and climaxed with Forbidden Planet in 1956. (FYI, the other two movie ads along with “Day” were for The Thing from Another World and When Worlds Collide.) Read the Rest …