Category: Science Fiction
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There are no valid futurisms or futurologies
The science fictional project is mainly a historical project, and to the extent there is any such thing as a futurological project, that would also be a historical project, so this isn’t a good distinction to try to make. I don’t think there are any valid futurisms or futurologies. I think most people who describe…
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Words were your matter
Science fiction was always far too small a box to contain your writing. Hero is far too small a word to contain what you’ve been to me, and will always be to me. From all of us who are trying to walk away from Omelas: go easy, Starbear. We promise to continue the work.
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The solutionism of the Hope Police
Of course, if you really need to blame someone, look no further than those naysayers over in the corner; they’re the ones who didn’t Dream Big enough, after all. They’re the ones who failed to Inspire the rest of us. Don’t blame us when the boulder squashes you flat; blame them, for “making us all fear…
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On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene
If sci-fi convincingly simulates another world, it gives the reader ways of imagining our world otherwise. Science fiction is more, not less, “realist” than literary fiction. It does not produce the fiction of a severed part of a world, as if the rest was predictable from the part. It produces a fiction of a whole…
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Tomorrow composts today
*The “better future” thing is jam-tomorrow and jam-yesterday talk, so it tends to become the enemy of jam today. You’re better off reading history, and realizing that public aspirations that do seem great, and that even meet with tremendous innovative success, can change the tenor of society and easily become curses a generation later. Not…