Tag: SF

Politics and The Hunger Games

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I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by …

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Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

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While there are many books I’ve read in the last few years and thoroughly enjoyed, it’s rare that I read something and feel as if I had been missing something amazing for years and years, and felt a desire to kick myself for taking so long to get around to something. Because I feel like I’ve learned something about the world, reading this novel: something desperately important and something we have forgotten, to our own peril. I first read Jack Womack’s word in 2000 or 2001 — I’d say probably the latter, just before I left Canada for Korea — …

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A Particular American Fervency? (How It Might Connect to SF?)

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I just ran across a really interesting quote on American culture, which was embedded in a discussion of jazz, but seems to apply quite well to American SF as well. Apparently, from 1961 to 1965, a British literary critic named A. Alvarez ran a show on BBC radio where writers talked about the intellectual scene in the United States. Alvarez collected the interviews  in a book, published by Penguin in 1965, under the same title as the radio program: Under Pressure. One of the Americans interviewed was Robert Lowell, and he’s what he had to say about it: We have some …

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What I read in 2011

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My hopes of reading 50 books in 2011 were dashed by a lot of busy work, and all I’ve got to show for my reading this past year is a mere 47 48 49 titles, plus a few on the go — a surprising number of the finished books being cooking, baking, and brewing books. That said, of, those books I did read, I had a range of reactions, many of them blogged here (under this tag). Since I apparently cannot embed the code for the covers here in this post, here’s a permalink to a screenful of covers over …

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John Coltrane and the Pulp Connection

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Arguably one of the most significant musicians in American history (and unarguably one of the most significant saxophonists and jazz musicians ever), John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina. It might be a weird thing to bring up —  where he grew up, that is — except that, when we think about major artists, we so often imagine them having sprung into being fully-formed, if not in technique or approach, then at least in their essential selfhood. This is also often how we tell their stories: for example, in Coltrane: Story of a Sound (a book I’ve just …

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One For the Morning Glory by John Barnes

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One For the Morning Glory book cover image

John Barnes is one of those genre writers I’d heard of, but never happened to read until now. Oddly enough, he’s more well known for his SF work, but the book I stumbled upon, and decided to read, was his foray into the realm of magical adventure. Not epic fantasy, mind: One For the Morning Glory was intended as the second in a trilogy (of which neither first nor third got written, from what I can tell) it is as far from epic fantasy as can be. Rather, it is a lot like a fairytale, or maybe an existentialist’s version …

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Deus ex Pigritia, or Why You’d Better Not Get Me Started on Battlestar Galactica

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Inevitably, when someone hears that I am an SF writer, they immediately mentioned whatever SF things they happen to know about or like, expecting I, too, will like it. This is awkward because I usually rather hate their favorite book, TV show, or movie. Not all SF fans, or SF authors, like all SF. It’s a simple thing to say. But it’s another thing to explain it, and they usually seem to find the fact so unbelievable that an explanation seems wanted. My explanation almost never satisfies them, but maybe that’s because I haven’t rehearsed my sound bite. After all, …

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A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

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Every novel I read by Vinge seems to me to be better than the last. Maybe it’s because I started with earlier work, or maybe it’s just the impression that each of his books gives me. But one thing is for certain: A Deepness in the Sky certainly is a hell of a novel, space opera or not. I finished it last night, on the couch, very late into the night, and found myself in an odd position for such a time: I was excited about it, and wanted to talk about it. But it was the middle of the …

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The Pain of Prescience That Missed the Train

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When I was at the Clarion West workshop back in 2006, Vernor Vinge (our last instructor) spent a certain amount of time talking about the idea of “future-proofing” an SFnal story. The idea is that, since you’re talking about the future, you’re likely to get a bunch of things quite wrong. Anyone who’s read older SF knows this problem well, the signal example being the one everyone cites, of people on spaceships calculating the math for some complicated ship maneuver using slide rules, because nobody imagined calculating machines might get invented (and/or that such machines might become small enough to use …

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The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

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book cover: The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

The Iron Dream is notorious, or at least it was at some point in the past. Those who know of it almost surely know the schtick, and those who don’t probably wouldn’t be interested, but the short version is: imagine a world where Hitler, after being rejected from art school, decided to immigrate to the United States. Imagine him falling in with the pulp sci-fi scene, first as an illustrator and, soon enough, as an author of clunky, horrid, and unfailingly popular schlock. Imagine him enjoying a long career as a pro-writer and illustrator, an important role in fandom as …

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