The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed… [Read more…]
January 29, 2012
At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have… [Read more…]
January 22, 2012
Paulo Coelho, in amongst his thoughts on the insanity of SOPA, shares the idea that all writers are only recycling four stories. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. I… [Read more…]
January 13, 2012
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to direct your attention to the shortlist for the Kitschies, the annual awards organised by the folks at the Pornokitsch blog, which is quickly establishing itself as one of the two or three most relevant awards in fantastic literature. And the nominated novels are: The Enterprise of Death by Jesse… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
Science Fiction is often called a “literature of ideas”. Maybe it is better understood as a literature of change. Listen to the Guardian books podcast: Science Fiction now and tomorrow. Today’s Guardian books podcast, which I was lucky enough to be invited to take part in alongside Lauren Beukes, Alaistar Reynolds, Jeff Noon and Michael… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
“People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.” Or read about it in books, we can assume. Which is all very well for Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French nobleman and writer of maxims, to say – but is much harder to live by. Yes, perhaps, in the postmodern sense love… [Read more…]
December 13, 2011
Éric Poindron’s Étrange (*) Questionnaire. Discovered at the Weird Fiction Review. (*) Bizarre, extraordinary, singular, surprising. Le Robert Dictionary 1 – Write the first sentence of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Dark Lord in posession of a plot to destroy the… [Read more…]
December 9, 2011
This evening I bought Jeffrey Eugenides ‘The Marriage Plot’ from the Amazon Kindle store. I would love to say that I always buy books when it would be just as easy to download a pirate version for free, but I would be being dishonest. But buying the book has recently become a far more likely… [Read more…]
December 6, 2011
This potent rite-of-passage tale offers readers some useful pointers on keeping the heart warm in allegorically wintry times. The novel that raised Haruki Murakami to literary superstardom ranges across the seasons, but the heart of its meaning is found in winter. When 30-something Toru Watanabe hears a fragment of the titular Beatles track after a long airplane… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
After enough years in fandom there are certain arguments you learn to steer clear of because they are futile and never end. Genre definitions are one of them and I really should know better by now, however… The pugnacious @gavreads earlier tweeted the following definitions, distilled from this IO9 report on a talk between Margaret Atwood… [Read more…]
December 1, 2011
Recent SF novels dealing with the fall of western capitalism seem right on the mark. But do they offer any answers? It’s a truism that science fiction, however distinct its vision of the future, is always just as much a reflection of its present. The golden age of SF writers, including Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein… [Read more…]
November 29, 2011
(I was too ill to link this from my blog when it was published on The Guardian online, so here it is now.) I am forced into speech because men of letters refuse to act without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing the publication… [Read more…]
January 31, 2012
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