Category: REVIEWS

Prime Time Genre and Cultural Difference in Narrative Construction — Or, The Theme of Work in Western TV

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This week is hectic in part because the biannual Student Presentation Contest is coming up. It sounds more, er, voluntary than it actually is: a contest lends at least a little more of an air of excitement to what is a graduation requirement: every student must give a ten minute presentation to the department. Well, no, not to the department, but to an audience. It turned out that if we actually ran the contest these days the way we did originally, there would be something like 450 minutes of speeches back-to-back, or run over two days, and no human being …

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Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G. Wells, by Andrea Lynn

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Not so very long ago, in a post where I requested some help regarding some articles, and discussed some of my ongoing readings, I bashed Terry Eagleton’s self-righteous and dismissal of H.G. Wells, in the course of his review of the book I am now reviewing myself, University6 of Illinois scholar Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers: The Last Affairs of H.G. Wells. Leaving aside Eagleton’s ignorant and sniping attack on Wells as a writer — it’s par for the course when self-appointed cardinals and pontiffs of literature look in any direction that even faintly bears the markings of popular fiction, be …

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In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells

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Again, as part of the research for my current writing project, I’ve been digging into some of the work of H.G. Wells, specifically the stuff he’s famous for today. It may surprise some people — not the SF fans reading my site, of course, but perhaps those who never checked out Wells beyond his work — that H.G. Wells was more well-known in his time for things other than those scientific romances of the early days, like The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine. One thing he was well-known for …

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Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction, and Prophecy

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It’s difficult to write a bloggable review of a work of academic scholarship, given the nature of blogs and the nature of academic texts, so I’ll just note that this book provided me with a fascinating chunk of discussion on the “prophetic” feature or function of SF through a look at the work of H.G. Wells. Parrinder in this book argues that Wells, in his approach to the utopian novel, breaks with the past in how he the notion of prophecy is handled, in his attitude towards science in the context of SF, and much more. There’s more than just …

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Wraith: The Great War by Bruce Baugh

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It was the rainy last day of March 2010 when I began writing this. I am told the winter was “hard” and “cruel,” with altogether more snow than is normal, and though I missed much of that, I got a taste this month. Hard. Cruel. These words draw laughter from the ghosts of the past, which haunt our modern world, whether or not we realize it. “Hard and cruel?” they ask, snickering as they glimpse at my dry, warm apartment, the bucket of beer-in-the-making fermenting on the kitchen table, the shelves full of books, the fridge stocked with food. “You …

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Spidey’s Eyes, The Greys, and The Fourth Kind

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The other day, a few of my students were talking about that dreadful colostomy bag of a film, The Fourth Kind. Apparently some of them — including, most surprisingly, a science major, and by that I mean a student majoring in the hard sciences — had fallen for the fake “real footage.” We (gently, mind) had a little talk about a few things: The cultural concentration of alien-abduction reports, which suggests that they, like sightings of ttokaebi, are manifestations of culturally-determined imagination or delusion, rather than factors in the real world. (The fact that so few alien abduction accounts originate …

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The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

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Having decided to defer my review of Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days until I’ve read his other book in the same world/setting, River of Gods, I have decided to skip ahead and review the next book I read, a nonfiction piece by Steven Johnson. This book was a loaner from my friend Charles, who recommended it highly to me. If I remember right, he picked it up at The Strand, which is one of the most wonderful bookstores I’ve ever visited… so much so that I even got a T-shirt when I was there. Maybe that doesn’t interest readers, but I …

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On Being Human

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Note: I wrote this about a week ago, but I got too busy to copy the final version from my netbook to this site. I finally have a free minute, during a class preparation break, so here you go. Posting will be slow for a while, till I’ve built up that momentum so crucial to propelling myself through the semester. I figure it’ll be about a week till things are back to normal, in terms of my free time. Having torn through both of the extant seasons of the British TV series Being Human, I can say I really like …

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