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Escape Has A Destination But It’s Never Far Away
“It is unfortunate to me that we have to classify reading fiction as anything other than what it is. Why must it be escaping “from” something? If it has to be escapism, aren’t we escaping “to”...
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The Book is a Fantastical Thing
I’ve been reading a lot about reading recently, and it struck me the other day that a lot of the scientific research on the topic (at least, what I have read so far) doesn’t care much about the format...
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Utopia of Puppets and Fools: Robert Jackson Bennett’s AMERICAN ELSEWHERE
“Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.” – Albert Camus “There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.” –...
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Six Fervently-Held Hypotheses Regarding “Willing Suspension of Disbelief”
“He could not map the alterity he felt.” – China Miéville, Iron Council “I don’t really think that ‘disbelief’ is an action, anyway. I don’t think it can be ‘suspended’. It suggests that we exist in a...
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The SFnal Comforts of Being an Apocalypst
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St....
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The Revelations of Estrangement: SF and the Displacement of Ostranenie
“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life…” Viktor Shklovsky “For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to...
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Heartbreak and Vision: What Speculative Fiction Provoked In Me
“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in...
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What Sense Is There To Wonder If It Leaves The Stars In Place?
“What makes SF compelling is not the ‘sense of wonder’ it can generate or its unmooring from reality, but that it creates a sort of lyrical transgression that can dissolve and redefine boundaries.”...
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Gods and Humans, Puppets and Ghosts: Zachary Jernigan’s NO RETURN
“‘Are you my friend?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she said truthfully, ‘whether or not you’re a puppet.” – Berun and Churls, No Return, p. 259. I’ve been reading a lot the past few months but not writing about...
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Facing the Inescapable Through the Fantastic
“Most terrible about the dead was the way in which they did not, could not, could never, could never even hope to change.” Joanna Russ, from “Poor Man, Beggar Man.” “It’s no use reminding yourself...
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Why I Needed Weirdness
“Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.” – Karen Russell I am currently working on two...
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The Fettered Imagination of Fantastika
“If there is one single message we should take from science fiction, it is that the imagination has an unspeakably important role to play in solving the problems of our world.” – Damien Walter One of...
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“Ambiguity is a feature of most of my work” – On Reading Lucius Shepard
“The way things happen, not the great movements of time but the ordinary things that make us what we are, the savage accidents of our births, the simple lusts that because of whimsy or a challenge to...
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Roaming the Borderlands of Fantasy
Not long ago there was an acrimonious discussion online of what constituted “being a fan” of Science Fiction that focused in great measure on what one did or did not read. I started to write a response...
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The Maudlin Fantastic and the Magic of Truth: On Gabriel García Márquez
“’Books are worthless,’ Abrenuncio said with good humor.” – from Of Love and Other Demons. It is hard to resist the pull of hagiographic adulation when writing about an author such as Nobel...
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