Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Art

  • don’t tell me what to do, show me

    Adam Roberts responds here to a tweet by Tade Thompson which (to be very reductive) argues for a full reversal of the old “show, don’t tell” edict, beating up on which seems to have become something of a shibboleth of the online writing community in recent times. In his sometimes Bartleby-ish way, Roberts rejects this…

  • the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety

    Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of…

  • stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite

    Wonderful essay here at LitHub by Ellie Robins. I was sold from this moment: The truth is, there can be no such thing as a monomyth. Stories are alive, and like all living beings, they exist in ecosystems. In the living world, a monoculture always spells death. Ellie Robins https://lithub.com/how-to-go-home-on-resisting-a-very-english-heros-journey/ TFW someone totally nails, with…

  • images which know that they are science fictional / Neom

    I would never attempt—nor even wish to attempt—to gainsay Gary Wolfe on the matter of science fiction as it appears in ink on pulp or text on screens; he is a model of critical generosity, and a very nice chap to boot. But there’s an aside in his review of the new Lavie Tidhar that…

  • but who has seen the work?

    The question ‘but who has seen the work?’ points to a broader problem of the public sphere: who is talking to whom, and through which media. If we conceive of the arts broadly enough – to include, say, video games and popular music – their reach is certainly broad, though it always splits along different…