Ladies, gentlemen, permit me to present to you the stone cold weirdest SF music ever recorded: ELP’s 1971 magnum opus Tarkus. Interestingly, Tarkus backwards is Suk Rat, which must be more than a coincidence, because that’s precisely what the song “Tarkus” does. It sucks a rat. It sucks a rat’s balls. It sucks a futuristic cyborg rat’s balls. Continue reading Sucking rats: Tarkus by Emerson, Lake and Palmer
Readers may remember Canadian writer Basnett from his Substars trilogy (Density, the second volume of which, was nominated for the De Granville Prize). Sparklers is a fat stand-alone volume in the same mode, which is to say it is a fast-paced galactic space opera with an ingenious central premise and occasional moments of poetry. Basnett is quickly becoming a writer worth noticing. Continue reading Book review: Michael Basnett – Sparklers
“Great title”, said a friend when I emailed him to say I’d received this book to review; “what’s it about? No, don’t tell me, let me guess—”
I bet this book is arguing that the problem with utopia has been too large a concern with the other feller, too much ‘you’ and not enough ‘me’. I’d wager it’s written by an ex-hippy, somebody now wearing a silk suit and driving an open-top BMW, who’s come to see that self-love is the road to a harmonious society. I’ll go so far as to imagine a sentence from this book: ‘how can we love others if we don’t first love ourselves, and love must be the basis of any utopia. Am I right?
I mention this because, like my friend, I assumed from the title that this book would be a 21st-century revisioning of hippy idealism through the ‘ethical selfishness’ of the late twentieth-century: but, like my friend, I could not have been more wrong. Continue reading Book review: Kramer Wand – me:topia
The excitement in the academic community at the discovery of four new Nietzsche notebooks has percolated, to some extent, into the general culture; and a palpable thrill has echoed through the SF community with the news that one of these notebooks contains Nietzsche’s thoughts on the—then—new genre of science fiction: Einleitende Studie, Also Sprach Zukunftsromane. The Adam Roberts Project, in conjunction with Futurismic Publishing Incorporated, is proud to be the first to reprint a selection of these Nietzschean apothegms; the full edition will be published later this year, in a dual-language edition, by Unwahrscheinlicheraben Buchbindung. Continue reading Nietzsche on science fiction
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