Philip K Dick’s partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie drug culture takes place under the eternal sunshine of southern California. Even the book’s nighttime is saturated with the electric glare of strip mall lighting and the glow of the television screen. And in a society that never switches off the lights, the dark has become [...]
Over on Twitter and Facebook I asked folk to tell me which SF author they would turn to for life advice, for words of wisdom and guidance through the labyrinth of life. And I got quite a response! [View the story "Wisest of the wise in SF & Fantasy" on Storify] Popular choices include Neil [...]
Will Ellwood asks the simple question, can serious writing succeed without facing both the real…and the fantastic? Follow Will on Twitter @fragmad Discovering your voice as a writer is more complex problem than is often acknowledged. This is not a problem of simple replicable craft that can be taught in a classroom, but is instead [...]
The Booker prize judges have yet to acknowledge the flowering of British SF and fantasy. Will 2011 be a breakthrough year? Speculative fiction has produced many great works of literature. Even a partial list of SF’s canonical works could fill many blogposts. It would be difficult to talk seriously about the last century of literature [...]
Today is the two year anniversary of the start of Clarion 2008. This time two years ago I was being collected by Dan Pinney and Megan Kurashige from a random street corner in San Diego, for the drive up to La Jolla and UCSD where I and seventeen others were going to spend six weeks [...]
Tomorrow I lead the first of three workshops in Science Fiction and Politics. (The organisers have sold 14 out of 12 tickets, which I take as a good sign.) I’ve had good fun selecting books to talk about, and looking through the sometimes odd political perspectives SF writers have taken over the years. I’ve also [...]
Now work with me here. I know its a leap, but I’m starting to think that the hit television show Madmen is a work of science fiction. I’ve been geeking out over Madmen season two for the last fortnight. And when I say geeking out, I mean obsessing. Having watched season one three times (friends [...]
Philip José Farmer, who passed out of this world yesterday, was among the last of a generation who emerged from the revolutionary literature of science fiction. Along with contemporaries including Robert Heinlen, Isaac Asimov, Philip K Dick and and Kurt Vonnegut, Farmer dedicated his life to writing stories that forced their readers to confront and [...]
