Publications of the type:
If you enjoyed the stark, violent catastrophism of The Windup Girl, you’ll likely find much to enjoy about The Water Knife, though its apocalypse-in-progress (the ever-escalating drought in the southern US) is considerably closer to home in temporal terms. A stickler for taxonomy might highlight its paucity of technological novums, and argue that it’s really…
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.” William Blake It is difficult to know where to start. Stay is the fifth collection of John Clute’s reviews and essays to date, and stands alongside a couple of monographs (and hell knows how many other uncollected bits and bobs) as the latest waystone…
Now then, pay attention: Adam Roberts is to para-literary criticism as Stewart Lee is to comedy. In a recent interview, Lee explains how he’s taken deliberate steps over the last decade to create a situation where his audience comes to him on his own terms, rather than on anyone else’s expectations or promises. This included…
If you already know one thing about The Peripheral, it’s that William Gibson’s new novel sees him go back to the future. And not to just one future, but two—although one of those futures is the future of the other future, if you see what I mean. Let’s start closest to home: the nearer of…
While introducing a section devoted to Christopher Priest (who else?), Paul Kincaid makes a claim which—to my mind, and apparently to Kincaid’s, also—is a reliable marker that one is reading a critic rather than a reviewer: that writing a positive review is a far greater challenge than a negative one. Kincaid is referring to his…
Frederic Jameson is often quoted as saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism; the popularity of predominantly dystopian narratives of futurity—whether delivered as multiplex blockbusters or economic forecasts—would seem to bear him out. But the sf-nal utopian tradition has long had a…
Kindred, the most successful (and least overtly science fictional) novel by the late Octavia Butler, has a simple plot. In 1976, Dana, a black woman and writer, moves into her new Los Angeles home with her white husband. Before they settle in, however, Dana is transported through time and space to a Maryland riverbank in…
Looking Landwards commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Institution of Agricultural Engineers, but it’s no promo publication; almost all of the stories herein go some way towards shining a light on the Janus faces of agritech, exploring the tension between being advantaged by technology at the same time as being reliant upon it. Douglas Adams…
“Science fiction” is in crisis. The sign “science fiction” is now referent to two related yet distinct signifieds, and the crisis only inheres in one of them. Sf as a literary mode, as a rhetoric, has always staunchly resisted any attempt at precise functional definition, but is easy enough to locate (albeit approximately, as one might…
One grows accustomed to books that promise much and deliver little, but when the book in question is a career retrospective of William Gibson, you’d be forgiven for having high hopes; after all, Gibson was an instrumental part of the cyberpunk revolution—a revolution rapidly assimilated back into the skiffy mainstream, admittedly, and a label that…