Tag: fiction
-
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…
-
A kind of asynchronic overlay
I try to undo the distinction that’s usually made between “fiction” and “reality,” as though “fiction” were synonymous with fakery. I don’t think that’s the right layout to work with; I think there’s something else going on. […] I try to argue that “fiction” is best understood in terms of a gap or interim, a delay…
-
The critical utopia vs. the consumptive picaresque
Three things make a post, as we used to say. Here’s Yuval Noah Harari — whose book(s) I really need to make the time to read in full — being roundtabled at Teh Graun: The key issue is that because our power depends on collective fictions, we are not good in distinguishing between fiction and…
-
Roadtrips and brickbats
It’s high time I collected up mentions of and responses to the manifold things I’ve been up to over the last year or more, having fallen rather out of the habit; the decline of G**gle Alerts meant I stopped paying attention, basically. I can’t even do vanity right! Anyway, let’s start with fiction. I’ve not published…