Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Science Fiction

  • the ubiquitous fictionality of narratives of futurity

    Doing that thing where one quotes a famous and respected person saying things one has been saying for years, in the hope that it’ll be more palatable coming from someone famous and respectable. Once again, it’s yer man KSR, of course: All attempts to speak of the future are science fiction stories, and thus bound…

  • Geology and empire : Jemisin (2015), The Fifth Season

    So, N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. I’m going to have to try to restrict myself a bit here, because I can’t spend all day writing about a novel (or at least I can’t spend all day today writing about a novel), but it would be very easy to spend all day, or possibly more…

  • Thirst, fear, faith : Butler (1993), Parable of the Sower

    Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is another canonical work of sf / dystopia / climate fiction which I’d never got round to reading. It was interesting to go through it with the LUCSUS Masters students, because they picked out things I might not have noticed, or would otherwise have passed over as a given…

  • Fear of a blank planet: Atwood (2003), Oryx & Crake

    I ended up running a hybrid book-club-seminar thing with the students on the LUCSUS Masters course earlier this semester, for which I was asked to suggest a list of “cli-fi” books that the students could choose from. (Yes, I know, “cli-fi”; I’ll return to that bone of contention some other time.) Long story short: the…

  • the worst has been averted, at least temporarily

    Steven Shaviro on KSR’s new joint: [Kim Stanley] Robinson is juggling many threads, but he has no interest in combining them all into a tightly organized narrative. This is in part, at least, because the world we live in doesn’t work that way. It is unimaginably complex, and it is at least potentially open. The…