About

Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room and writes, writes about and reviews science fiction and fantasy. His essays and reviews have appeared in AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. His sf fanzine, Ecdysis, was a two-time finalist for the Aurora Award. His other web projects include DFL, a blog about last-place finishes at the Olympics that made him world famous for 10 days in 2004, and Gartersnake.info, a website for garter snake keepers.

At Readercon in 2014. Photo: Scott Edelman.

Jonathan has been interviewed or profiled by Agence France-Presse, the BBC World Service, the Boston Globe, CBC Newsworld, CTV Newsnet, Folha de São Paolo, the Hamilton Spectator, the National Post, the Ottawa Sun, Reuters, RTÉ, Sports Illustrated, the Toronto Star and the West Quebec Post, among others. He has also appeared as a panelist and presenter at science fiction conventions like Can-Con, Readercon and SFContario.

A former historian, civil servant, snake breeder, reporter, and fanzine editor, Jonathan lives in Shawville, Quebec, on a property a friend once described as “living in an Enid Blyton novel,” with his wife and their menagerie of cats, snakes and typewriters.

About Angus McWetboy

Jonathan uses “mcwetboy” as his username an awful lot. What’s that about?

“Angus McWetboy” first appeared during his stint at the University of Waterloo, where he published a surreal e-mail newsletter for the history graduate student association in which “Angus” was a recurring character. The name meant nothing in particular, just a few syllables that sounded funny to him at the time. “Angus” was a madman who obsessed about imported cheese products from faraway places, and the insect pests that infiltrated his stocks (cheese weevils, Tajikistan—made no sense). Most of his fellow students didn’t get the joke, and begged him to tone down the lunatic tone of the newsletter before it got them into trouble with their professors.

Later on, it seemed unique and meaningless enough to use as a user name and as a domain name for his home page, which lived at mcwetboy.com from 2001 to 2011.

Copyright

The text and photography on this website is subject to copyright. Please ask Jonathan’s permission before copying, distributing, reprinting or otherwise making use of the text beyond what is generally allowed under the fair use doctrine. He takes a liberal approach to fair use. Which is to say: by all means link to a blog post or article, and feel free to quote excerpts. But don’t reproduce the whole thing.

Some content, such as blog comments, material quoted or embedded in blog entries, furnished images and logos, and other examples of other people’s work shared here either by permission or under the fair use doctrine, as well as content produced as work for hire, such as journalism presented here as part of a work portfolio, may need the permission of their respective copyright holders to copy, distribute or display them elsewhere.

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