Is Science Fiction in America Unique?
(This post is technically the last half of the post I started here, though it has diverged from a discussion of Alan Moore.) What is it about America and science fiction? We seem to have a love affair with the stuff as a society, with most of what we watch somehow associated with the genre. […]
Alan Moore, Science Fiction, and America (Part One: A Little History)
Alan Moore is perhaps best known for his graphic novel work–Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V For Vendetta, too name a few. His most recent venture, Dodgem Logic, is an underground magazine which seems to be about as quirky as they come (I might get myself an issue for the hell of it over Christmas break). […]
Harry Potter: Would it still be big if Harry was Harriett?
I can’t remember where I got the link to this thread at SFFWorld, but the second I saw it, I knew I had to talk about it here. The thread was started by a user named Rilzik, who asked a very peculiar, but interesting question about the Harry Potter series. Specifically, he or she asked: […]
Speculative Horizons to Close For Questionable Reasons
I’ve nothing against James Long, author of Speculative Horizons–one of the good SF/F blogs out there. His blog has been in my Google Reader for almost a year now and I’ve enjoyed many of his thoughtful posts. But it appears he’s decided to close things down. Why? Partly because he’s going to be an editorial […]
The Production of Canon: A Pointless Argument?
An amusing discussion took place last week in one of my classes (the SF/utopia one). We were talking about Tom Moylan’s Scrapes of Untainted Sky and Luckhurst’s Science Fiction and how Luckhurst’s one-page claim about the awful practice of canon production in key theoretical texts (Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Carl Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction, […]
Science Fiction Criticism: Inside vs. Outside
One of my colleagues recently asked me what I thought about the academic texts on science fiction we had been reading over the semester. Specifically, she was curious about my opinion on the inside and the outside, and who, more or less, has the “right” to comment upon the genre. Before I get into that, […]