Tag: form

  • discontinuity against ubiquity: narrative form and climate crisis

    Lots of food for thought (and suggestions of novels to read) in this LARB dialogue on the topic of “fiction in the age of climate catastrophe” between authors Anne Charnock and James Bradley. It’s all of interest, but the following clips are relevant enough to merit excerpting here for reference purposes: James Bradley: The problem,…

  • inside among the outsiders

    Sean Guynes on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: … whereas most utopian novels before Le Guin sent an outsider into the utopian society, tracing their voyage through the social, economic, and political structures of the “better” worlds offered by Gilman’s Herland or Bellamy’s United States, Le Guin cut the narrative in half, shuffled the deck, and…

  • Beyond the Narrative Arc

    Patterns other than the wave, though, are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.” Spiral: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus. Meander: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a…

  • 253 (Print Remix) by Geoff Ryman

    I’ve known of 253 (a.k.a. Tube Theatre) for quite some time, but I’ve only just read it, after stumbling across the (Philip K Dick Award-winning) “print remix“ in the dealer’s room at Eastercon. Its original incarnation was as a website – which still exists, seemingly untouched and untweaked since it was built in 1996. Wikipedia…