“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…
Monthly Archives: April 2013
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…
Sometimes, science fiction cover artists get it right, and the result is great. Generally they get it wrong. And sometimes, they get it, well, I don’t know. Like the beefcake Gandhi-Rambo in Mike Resnick’s Alternate Warriors:
THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you need stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.…
SFGenics: Notes on Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction 