I thought you’d all love to hear about this: the Regal Literary Agency is having another giveaway of Audrey Niffenegger’s newest hit, Her Fearful Symmetry. If you don’t know who that is, she’s the wonderful writer who brought us The Time Traveler’s Wife, which was recently turned into a major motion picture featuring Rachael McAdams.
If you decide to enter, please let them know that you heard about it from me (Shaun Duke). Pretty please!
Thanks and good luck!
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
Dr. Shaun Duke © 2010 - 2025. All Rights Reserved.
8 Responses
You mean the wonderful writer of the book that was turned into a terrible, terrible movie. Don't you??
I didn't see the movie. So I have no idea if it was any good or not.
By the way, I heard your interview on Adventures in Scifi Publishing the other day and I have to say you do not sound at all like you look. Good interview though!
The movie was good, in my opinion. A romantic drama film that I was able to enjoy spending with my better half. However, I did hear the book was 10x better. So I entered & so noted for you. Best of Luck!
Yeah, I'm hearing the same thing. Read a review in the newest Interzone that pretty much panned the movie :P.
Thanks Shawn, it was a great interview to do.
The reason I thought The Time Traveler's Wife was a stupid movie was that if you think about it for 10 seconds the whole thing falls apart.
Our Time Traveler says that he can't affect the future and never even TRIES! We have to take his word for it, despite the fact that he marries a woman he wouldn't have met otherwise.
Also, his daughter is going to have a very short life and probably die terribly. In the world of the novel, a HUGE plot point is that the traveler goes back naked and is then chased around and beaten up. The daughter is able to control her powers "sometimes". Well, the other times, she's going to be a naked woman in the exact same scenarios. If the time traveler had problems… can you imagine what would happen to the daughter??
Also, the biggest non-paradox problem occurs when Claire asks the traveler "who would want to live a life like this". That's what Damon Knight used to call a "Signal from Fred". Why would anyone want to live that life???? The question is never answered…
Those are just some of the dozens of plot holes.
Don't get me wrong, Back to Future had paradoxes too, but at least in that case the movie was having fun with itself. In TTW we are expected, by the very seriousness of the film, to buy a steaming shovel-full of crap in order to enjoy the movie.
Jordan: It's SHAUN with a U. Get it right, man! I'm mortally offended!
Have you read the book? I recently read a review of the movie in the latest Interzone that ripped into it even more than you did, and I'm curious what you think of the book.
Dude, you sign everything "SMD" and your name appears nowhere on the front page of your blog. I had to do RESEARCH to actually figure out what it was. RESEARCH! ! ! 😉
No, I haven't read the book, but I can see why it could work. Apparently, it's vastly different from the movie and much more cerebral.
Jordan: Clearly you need to reassess the efficacy of your research practices :P.