Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Criticism

  • 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…

  • they’ll not know the difference

    Work is going slow today, which is to say not really going at all; I had a medical procedure this morning—nothing serious: an elective procedure, shall we say, rather than an emergency—and, while I’m in less discomfort than I expected, I’m still fairly distracted. So I figure it’s as good a time as any to…

  • haunted by (hopeful) futures

    The great pleasure of following Adam Roberts’s blogging—once you’ve gotten past the minor frustration of finding that he’s upped sticks and moved to another domain and/or platform for whatever he’s currently driven to write about—is watching him try out ideas, throw together a hypothesis, then start poking it to see if it holds up. Latest…

  • the influence of anxiety

    Fredric Jameson, clearing his throat before a long piece (from 2007) on the half-centennial of Garcia Garquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude: Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you…

  • a recurring theme in literary and cinematic history

    This piece by Megan Marz at Real Life references a lot of (contemporary, literary?) fiction that I’m completely unfamiliar with, but in the context of a phenomenon I am more familiar with, and very interested in, as both a writer and a human being: the slipperiness and perpetual redefinition of the word story. The whole…