Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.
Strange. Surreal. Shocking. Beautiful.
One of science fiction’s traditional roles in our culture has been to forecast the future: to theorize about what might come next, or what consequences might be imagined for current-day decisions.
It’s a little surprising to me that Western audiences don’t read more Asian fantasy. We consume fantastic action-adventure cinema out of Hong Kong and loads of fantastic manga and anime out of Japan, but mainstream genre readers remain staunchly loyal to alternate Europes, or, more rarely, alternate Asias penned by Westerners
There’s a certain kind of story about working-class men in hard circumstances that comes up a lot in the literature of resource economies. We have a long history of sending our poor men into hard, labourious work that often claims lives young: fishing, mining, logging, and now add to that oil extraction.
The best thing about flash fiction is that it is exactly the right length to read on the subway; underground with no WiFi. When Daily Science Fiction recently announced that they would stop running their longer stories on Fridays, I had to admit I was relieved.
The surveillance society dystopia has attracted more mainstream critical attention than the entire rest of genre combined, thanks to a rich array of prescient offering from Orwell’s 1984 to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.
I am of the opinion that Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is the greatest post–apocalyptic novel ever written. It has everything: the collapse of a great empire, a world–spanning war, an apocalyptic winter, a gritty civil war, ruined cities, post–industrial scrounging, wilderness survivalism, and even cannibalism.
The best thing about flash fiction is that it is exactly the right length to read on the subway; underground with no WiFi. When Daily Science Fiction recently announced that they would stop running their longer stories on Fridays, I had to admit I was relieved.
Non-violent strength is one of my holy grails of specfic writing. Can a character be active, engaging, powerful and in control without being militant? Of course they can. It’s just a harder trick to pull off than letting your characters go off the rails and kick all their problems in the face.
I am of the opinion that Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is the greatest post-apocalyptic novel ever written. It has everything: the collapse of a great empire, a world-spanning war, an apocalyptic winter, a gritty civil war, ruined cities, post-industrial scrounging, wilderness survivalism, and even cannibalism.
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