Publications of the type:
John Rieder’s introduction to Speculative Epistemologies aims the book at the question of “truth effects in sf” and invokes the Harawayean expansion of those initials: the field of enquiry includes science fiction and speculative fiction, of course, but also “speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact” (1-2). The book’s heart is six close readings…
Some day in the not too distant future, a scholarly monologue will pick up the gauntlet which Nina Allan offers in her introduction to The Art of Space Travel, where she mentions the unreliability of memory as a thematic of her work, and a sort of counter-motivation for her being a writer at all. I…
As I began to draft this review, I read a newsletter with a section titled “Can the world computer save the world?”, excerpting three essays by a tenacious technologist (who I shall decline to name) which advance a hand-wringing “what went wrong?” critique of cryptocurrency in order to conclude that—shock, horror, &c.—the particular flavour of…
As a fully paid-up (and largely burned-out) footsoldier of the countercultural 1990s turned aspirant sf author, when I first heard about Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love series (of which Castles Made of Sand is the second volume of five), I was kinda furious. Not because I’d had a similar idea for a story myself, exactly—though…
Let me lay my lotería cards on the table: I read little horror, if any. I picked out Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel because I bought and published some of her earliest stories, back when Futurismic was still a going concern, and I was curious to see what she was capable of with a decade more…
Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain begins with a death—at least, that’s the first temporal tile we encounter in its mosaic of narrative. The question of where (and when) the story starts is far more fraught, as questions of beginning and ending always are, but perhaps particularly so in this case. That particularity is a function of…
It is a genre fiction tradition that anthologies should come with an overt thesis, philosophy or theme. This makes it easier for the editor, giving them something to hang their commissions upon, and for the reviewer, giving them something to measure the book against. From this perspective, Phineas Harper’s brief introduction to Gross Ideas is…
If you ever publicly identify as a futurist, you will eventually be asked what contemporary futurism—an admittedly vague term which somehow covers everyone from tech-centric venture capital strategists and Pentagon policy wonks to Ray “Singularity” Kurzweil and the snake-oil Barnums of Silicon Valley—has to do with the proto-fascist 1920s Italian art movement of the same…
You might know Tim Maughan for his BSFA Award-nominated story “Havana Augmented”, or for his lengthening list of bylines on articles about the imminent future. (Or perhaps for his caustic yet compassionate presence on the birdsite.) But from now on, you should know him for his debut novel Infinite Detail, a tapestry of near-term prognostication…
You wait years for a horribly plausible novel about imminent civilisational collapse, and then two come along at once. In terms of topicality, M T Hill’s Zero Bomb can—and should—be read as a companion piece alongside Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, dealing as it does with an end-of-the-world inflicted by misguided infrastructural terrorism. But these are…