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.
It is with great pleasure that I can announce that the coming week sees the first instalment of a new monthly column here at Futurismic!
Its creator is no stranger to the site – having been a regular commenter, as well as providing us a review of all of the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist nominees for 2008 – and may well be no stranger to your bookshelves, whether in the form of his science fiction novels, criticism or histories.
Of whom do I speak? Well, let’s let The Adam Roberts Project explain it for [him/it]self, shall we?
The Adam Roberts Project is an algorithm for observing the world and generating text. It belongs to the future (hence ‘futurismic’) but more specifically to a 1970s future. The future promised us by Prog. The future we have been hitherto denied.
Among Adam Roberts Project’s previous productions are the concept albums Genesil, Land of Head-Yes, 21st Century Swiftly Man and Yellow Blue Tarkus.
Columns will be monthly and will be varied. No refunds will be offered.
The Adam Roberts Project also blogs at europrogovision.blogspot.com
Next Wednesday, we will be told why all genre fiction awards shortlists are rubbish.
Rest assured, I shall be pushing for a future column that explains the ongoing absence of our jetpacks…
This month in Blasphemous Geometries: the life-span of the Bush administration has seen an astonishing proliferation of super hero cinema.
Jonathan McCalmont compares the rhetoric of American foreign and domestic policy with the thematic underpinnings of the super hero movie genre, and explains why he’ll be as glad to see the back of costumed crusaders as he will the back of Bush.
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With the Bush era rumbling to a long overdue end, some critics have turned their gin-shortened attentions to the question of which cultural artefact best incapsulates W’s period in office. One popular yardsticks are the ways in which the Presidency has been depicted through film and TV. The Clinton era, for example, has come to be seen as a period of intensely human and libidinous cinematic Presidents such as those of Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993) and Rob Reiner’s The American President (1995). In fact, were it not for films such as Independence Day (1996) and Air Force One (1997) asserting the President’s penchant for arse-kicking you could be forgiven for forgetting that while Clinton claimed to feel people’s pain, he was no slouch when it came to meting it out in the form of air strikes and deciding, for the first time, that the spread of WMDs was a military matter.
However, while the Bush era has been quick to provide us with Presidents who are either mentally unstable religious zealots (Battlestar Galactica) or bloodless pragmatists more eager to seek revenge than examine the facts (The Sum of all Fears [2002]), the enduring cinematic icon of the Bush era is undeniably the super hero. Continue reading Super Hero Fatigue – Why I am Tired of American Rubber
This month in Blasphemous Geometries: what lessons can be taken from the successful branding of classic cinema and applied to science fiction literature?
Jonathan McCalmont suggests that repackaging the masterworks of the genre with a side serving of serious critical examination might add a cachet to science fiction which it has previously struggled to attain.
Continue reading Giving Science Fiction the ‘Criterion Collection’ Treatment
Fruitless Recursion is a genre fiction metacriticism e-journal run by Jonathan “Blasphemous Geometries” McCalmont, and the man himself has just released its third issue into the wild and constricted tubes of the interwubs. Go read the introductory editorial, and then pick from the following:
Jonathan’s been on quite a Lovecraft mission, it seems – Joshi and the Penguin Classics editions of Lovecraft’s work get a passing mention in tomorrow’s Blasphemous Geometries column, too…