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Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
This is a novel with an interesting conceit, written by a newcomer to SF (although according to Hodgkin’s own author bio, he has published a number of mainstream novels). The book takes the form of a biography, complete with preface, scholarly apparatus, timeline and everything else. The subject of the story is a fictional Science Fiction author, the Denis Bayle of the title, but the point of the book is less to tell a life story (Hodgkin doesn’t give Bayle that interesting a life).
Continue reading “Book review: Thomas Hodgkin – Denis Bayle: a Life”
James Morrow is a novelist with a reputation for satirising organised religion, but his new book Shambling Towards Hiroshima mashes up the original Godzilla movies with the nuclear attacks on Japan which ended the Second World War.
Given the opportunity to ask the man some questions, the first thing that leapt to my mind was to enquire as to why Morrow had decided to write about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and why he’d choose to mix in monster movies as a subtheme – despite the potential risk of being accused of irreverence or outright frivolity, or of resurrecting dead issues. It is Futurismic’s very great privilege to play post to his response.
Saint Thomas Aquinas famously remarked, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The same principle applies to classic American and Japanese monster movies. To one who loves this sort of cinema, no explanation is necessary. To one who does not, no explanation is possible.
As a school-age kid living in a sterile Philadelphia suburb in the late fifties, the culture of old horror films spoke to me in much the same way that God speaks to the theistically inclined. Thanks to my parents’ crummy little black-and-white television, plus my subscription to Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, I routinely enjoyed revelations from that wondrous and exotic celluloid realm. To see a chopped-up, truncated print of King Kong revived on late-afternoon TV was an authentically religious experience for me, and any broadcast of the 1956 Godzilla wasn’t far behind. Continue reading “ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima”
It looks like people have busy over the summer; within the space of twenty-four hours, the Futurismic inbox has received news of two independent science fiction-related projects looking for an audience.
And because we like people who get out there and have a go under their own steam, we thought we’d give them a mention.
What is Deadbooks.com? Here’s the blurb from the site:
Deadbooks.com is a massive Hyper-Serialization of Hasso Wuerslin’s SF-Horror series, The DeadBooks.
Spanning 150 chapters, involving 100 actors, and the cutting-edge sounds of musical artists worldwide, Deadbooks.com is a revolutionary mash-up of story-telling techniques.
The first ten-hour season is available now.
The first ten hour season?! You can’t fault the ambition there, can you? In his email, Wuerslin says the project has taken him eight years to finish:
“There may be purists out there who think I’m trying to kill ‘The Novel’, but I disagree. Why shouldn’t the novel stretch out in new directions; transform into a new form of entertainment?”
When CD-ROMs were the IT buzzword of the day, they promised us that multimedia novels would be ubiquitous – has the idea finally found a home on the web in the form of Deadbooks.com? Go take a look and find out, then come back and let us know what you think.
Phasma Ex Machina is a forthcoming independent sf/horror movie which “follows the lives of two brothers and an electrical engineer trying to decipher a series of strange events. Everything changes when they discover that the distance between the living and the dead isn’t all that far.”
Phasma Ex Machina’s producers are seeking feedback from the sf community about their concept. From the email:
“We are currently in the preproduction stages of the film and one of our foremost goals is to increase the authenticity of the supernatural and sci-fi genres. Your readers can give advice on what they would or wouldn’t like to see in a supernatural/sci-fi film.”
Hmm, crowdsourcing the test audiences, eh? From the reviews I’ve seen, I think George Lucas should have looked at doing something similar with his most recent output… If you’re intrigued and want to learn more, take a look around on the Phasma Ex Machina website. You can leave your feedback and opinions on their forum, too – but feel free to share ‘em here as well, OK?
As already noted at T3Aspace and reported by Gareth L. Powell, Jason Stoddard has decided to release an entire unpublished novel for free under a Creative Commons licence. Winning Mars is an expansion of the novella by the same name that appeared in Interzone #196.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Jason and I are friends, that he helped me out by building my concrete compound of doom in Second Life for me (and made a fine job of it too), and that I may have started this habit by convincing him to release his short story “Fermi Packet” in a similar fashion.
But in case you’re thinking that means you should take my recommendation with a pinch of salt, bear in mind that as well as being published in Interzone (more than once), he’s also sold short stories to us here at Futurismic, as well as Talebones, Darker Matter and Strange Horizons, among others.
What I’m trying to say is that this guy writes great science fiction, and that Winning Mars will be well worth your time. At this price (you know, like, free), how could it not be? All he asks is that you let him know what you though of it after you’ve read it, positive or negative.
So, what are you waiting for? Download the PDF of Winning Mars now, while stocks last!
[Cross-posted to VCTB]
