New Weird and Scifi Strange: Part One — Placing New Weird in the Aesthetic Moment
Adam Callaway has been talking about New Weird and Scifi Strange lately in response to Jason Sanford’s recent fictive table of contents for an anthology of Scifi Strange stories. One of the things that I find most interesting about discussions of genres, specifically subgenres, is how often readers and writers quickly dismantle the genre by […]
Why Science Fiction is Important to the Third World (Part One)
A little over a month ago, one of my professors asked me a question that, at the time, I was unable to answer. That question has haunted me since, largely because I really should have had a good answer at the time. The question was: Why do you think science fiction and other “fantastic” literary […]
Why Electronic Publishing Will End Civilization
You might be asking yourself: how the heck can something so revolutionary and so seemingly wonderful bring about the end of civilization? And I might ask you where you’ve been the last five years and why you haven’t considered the most important and most dangerous thing to a technology-oriented society ever imagined: zombies. You see, […]
Science Fiction and the Sensawunda
The other day I wrote about what makes a good science fiction movie. In the comments, a number of people quoted the phrase “sense of wonder” (or “sensawunda,” as many fans like to abbreviate it). We’ve heard this phrase before. Some have argued that science fiction now lacks “sensawunda,” and others have argued that “sensawunda” […]
Irrelevant Debates About Science Fiction: The Academy
One of the oldest debates in the science fiction community is that surrounding the academy–i.e. the university and its literary academia. We’ve heard the arguments before: some institution somewhere views science fiction literature as a pointless literary endeavor, so much so that to discuss it or apply its features to more acceptable forms of literature […]
National Identity in British science fiction
When I was asked to provide a guest post on British Sci Fi, I immediately called upon The Speculators, Leicester’s foremost group of short sci-fi writers, each of whom is a font of bizarre, random and extensive knowledge on the subject. At short notice I was joined by Catherine Digman, Will Ellwood and Daniel Ribot, […]