Publications of the type:
Rarely does an academic book set out its basic thesis so succinctly as the first page of John Rieder’s fascinating exploration of genre theory—so succinctly that I’m rather loathe to paraphrase, lest I muddy the waters. Nonetheless, here we go: the system of genres of which science fiction is a familial member (along with fantasy,…
Never has the title of a book so accurately summed up my experience of reading it. A collection of linked short fictions, Sisyphean kicks off with a “fragment”—less than a page of gnomic gesturings toward some grand cosmic scheme-of-things—before sliding straight into the titular piece, which netted Dempow Torishima the Sogen SF Short Story Prize…
If Hidden Sun is anything to go by, those Angry Robots have really raised their editorial game, steadily staking out a sweet spot between depth and accessibility. I particularly admire the efficiency with which Fenn sets out her board and game-pieces, deftly and swiftly showing character, but shifting to telling where necessary to keep things…
There’s a blurb on my copy of Gnomon where Warren Ellis explains how much he hates Nick Harkaway for having written it. I can relate: the ambition of this book would be enviable even if the execution weren’t very impressive. And the execution is very impressive indeed. I need to capture Gnomon’s essence in not…
It seems old sea-dogs can learn new tricks after all. We’ll likely never get Alastair Reynolds out of deep space, but Revenger sees him sailing a little closer to the narrative wind, swapping the over-engineered complexity that characterises his inimitable form of space opera for a slimmer, more nimble vessel. And yes, I’m getting the…
So, cards on the table: I was the editor who bought Adam Rakunas’s first published story. I mention this not to make claims upon his subsequent success, but to confess a bias on my part to the themes that animate his work. 2008’s “The Right People” was concerned with social networks—presciently so, with hindsight—but there…
When will we ever tire of angsting over the elusive and ever-more-fuzzy border between science fiction and literary fiction? No time soon, I’d wager: genres are, after all, not unlike nation-states, and it takes a lot of what sociologists call “boundary work” to keep a conceptual territory coherent over time. For some, the answer is…
If your closest familiarity with transhumanism is a vague awareness that it’s a secular religion whose uncritical technophilia and obsession with immortality occasionally provides Charlie Stross with the fuel for his angrier blog posts, then Pilsch’s Transhumanism is probably not an essential read for you. Nor, one imagines, is it very likely to become an…
In his introduction to this Masterworks edition of The Word for World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin’s classic novel of indigenous resistance, Ken Macleod observes that “the author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy”, and that Le Guin gives us herein the side of the coin less seen: “[T]hat oppression corrupts the oppressors is well…
Do you like clear plots and sympathetic characters? Do you relate to the tropes of genre in a similar manner to the signage for a motorway services, as being descriptive of the familiar pleasures one might encounter within? Did you kinda dig the monsters and conspiracies in X Files, but still find the elliptical cultural…