Category Archives: Columns

Interviews

ESSAY: JAMES MORROW on why he wrote Shambling Towards Hiroshima

James Morrow - Shambling Toward HiroshimaJames 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.

How I Shambled Towards Hiroshima

by James Morrow

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 →

Blasphemous Geometries

To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF

2 Comments

This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the new generation of British science fiction writers.

They can be hard to spot – for one thing, they’re not explicitly marketed as such. And furthermore, instead of describing futures defined by ever-increasing complexity, they seem preoccupied with the very British pursuit of “getting away from it all”.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

###

In the November 2003 issue of Science Fiction Studies, Roger Luckhurst wrote an article entitled “Cultural Governance, New Labour and the British SF Boom”. In the article, he describes the emergence of a new generation of British SF authors in the context of a series of cultural shifts that neatly coincided with the election of New Labour in 1997. With the once glorious political force that was New Labour now consuming itself in flames of incompetence, cowardice, corruption and authoritarianism, it seems an appropriate time to look ahead to the next cycle of boom and bust in British Science Fiction; to a generation of authors intent upon leaving it all behind. Continue reading To a Delightful Weekend in the Country: the New Generation of British SF →

The Adam Roberts Project

SF Awards – rubbish.

29 Comments

The Adam Roberts Project

A new year is upon us, which means in the happy lands of SF the first prize shortlists are peeking over the lip of their nests. Here’s the BSFA shortlist; Clarke, Nebula, Hugo and Phil Dick are all in the offing, sifting through 2008’s output to boil it down to a list of the best of the best.

Award shortlists are all rubbish.

Let me explain what I mean. Continue reading SF Awards – rubbish. →