Category: Science Fiction
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No consolation
Tim Maughan: Real people don’t have character arcs, or simple motivations, or background stories to be revealed in a prequel – those things are inventions of the entertainment industry. They’re marketable tropes. Real people are far more nebulous, complicated, they live far more in the moment and without definable meaning. They can’t be summed up…
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Thick skein
You can’t talk about every possible future in one work of science fiction—that would be crazy. But what you could do is tell a bunch of stories that are relatively plausible, that are set in the near future, and that describe a course of action that readers can imagine in a kind of “thick” texture.…
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“This opposition imagination”: Moylan (1980), Beyond Negation
Moylan, T. (1980). Beyond Negation: The Critical Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany. Extrapolation, 21(3), 236-253. This is the canonical paper defining the notion of the “critical utopia” in sf; Moylan went on to elaborate the idea in numerous articles and books further down the line, and I hope to get…
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Treehouse cootie exclusion notice
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Literary author writes book dealing with sf tropes and themes; author is asked if said book is science fiction; author insists it certainly isn’t, while describing it in terms ubiquitous in science fiction critical discourse; science fiction fandom predictably loses its shit and goes on to demonstrate…