I reproduce below the full text of “The Mundane Manifesto,” signed by Geoff Ryman and others from the 2004 Clarion West workshop (the complete list of workshop participants at the end of this post). The Manifesto argued for a science fiction that was squarely centered on humans and the future of planet Earth, including its…
The other day, while getting rid of some old papers which had been occupying the shelves for a while, I discovered a short piece I wrote about 6 years ago for a seminar on Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine master. A search on my email folders gave me a soft-copy which I post today. This…
This post is different from the others. I have been kind of caught up in all kinds of work, and will continue to be till the uni semester’s over. Anyway, met some friends who also happened to be sf buffs and we decided to spend the last night of this long weekend at a pub.…
“Science fiction then should be an effective literature of social criticism—but I have said that it is not. I will climb onto Limb Number Two in an attempt to explain why it is not. I believe that in science fiction the symbolism lies too deep for action to result, that the science fiction story does…
Three voices in today’s post: Bertrand Russell on the aesthetic effects of science, Stanislaw Lem on the possibilities of science fiction, and, as the last word, Ursula LeGuin on science fiction as a “thought experiment”. All three describe, in different ways, the impact of science on the literary imagination, and thus raise awareness about science…
In the following extract. J. G. Ballard, unarguably one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, speaks on the future in an interview with Rosetta Brooks: ——- BALLARD: I think that time, in the strict sense, is dying. The whole progress of the twentieth century has been described in terms of death and decline.…
In April 1926, Hugo Gernsback used the term “scientifiction” to refer to the content of his new magazine. In his profile piece on Gernsback in the September 1960 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Sam Moskowitz concludes his encomium thus: “‘His editorial in the first, April, 1926, AMAZING contained the statement, “Edgar Allan Poe may…
Before one can talk about the posthuman, one needs to accept the fundamental materiality of the human body. This is because consciousness itself needs to be located in its material receptacle, the physical human body, if it is to be deemed as capable of transference, for instance, in the process of mind uploading or brain…
Two classics of silent era SF, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis, and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita (1922) adapted for the screen by Yakov Protazanov in 1924, represent the impact of political movements on scientific development and visions of human futures. Metropolis has been endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted as representing, at various times, Bolshevik or…
“If, as Brian Aldiss contends, Frankenstein was the first true science fiction novel, it was also, appropriately enough, centrally concerned with the very dialectic that gave the mode birth. Whereas a fantasist of previous eras could have conjured the monster as a golem with an incantation or two and gone on to tell the same…
SFGenics: Notes on Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction 