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Category: Science Fiction

  • the axioms others take for granted are painful

    In which Stewart Hotston, a writer I was heretofore utterly ignorant of, propels himself into my need-to-read list: In the end all storytelling is political. There is no ‘entertainment only’ version of storytelling because for someone in the audience the axioms others take for granted are painful, disempowering and even oppressive. Only those who are…

  • the next underground

    TFW Simon Reynolds appears to have been rifling thru your list of near-future short-story ideas: It seems unimaginable, but it’s possible that the next underground will exist entirely off-line.

  • many bodies have borne the burden or paid the price / cli-fi as null category

    Lindsay Lerman discusses What “Climate Fiction” Does. (They’re her air-quotes, by the way, although I’m in full agreement with her reasons for using them.) … it is crucial that we recognize that, ultimately, there is no “cli-fi” and “not cli-fi.” All fiction has to grapple with place or setting in some way, and fiction often…

  • not oppositional, but negatory

    An interview with M John Harrison by Jonathan Lethem, done earlier this year at Festival Internacional de Literatura de Buenos Aires; scroll down for the (original) version in English. (Hat-tip to the man himself for linking to it.) I recall joking to a colleague a few years back that part of me wished Harrison wrote…

  • semiotics of utopia

    It’s yer man Stan Robinson, trying to (quite literally) square away the reductive dichotomy of [u/dys]topia: It’s important to remember that utopia and dystopia aren’t the only terms here. You need to use the Greimas rectangle and see that utopia has an opposite, dystopia, and also a contrary, the anti-utopia. For every concept there is…