Tag Archives: science fiction

Blog

Awards season

8 Comments

Well, I’m back from Eastercon, and – as is traditional at this time of year – the genre fiction awards cycle is gearing up, with results and nominations and longlists flying in every which direction.

At Eastercon itself, China Mieville took the BSFA Best Novel award while the inimitable Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia took the Short Fiction gong, and we got to hear the Hugo nominations announced to the world; last week saw the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced, and the Philip K Dick Award has just been called for Bitter Angels by C L Anderson – the latter being both a book and author of whom I am completely unaware.

If nothing else, the genre scene’s ability (and will) to debate the merits of the the work produced within it (and, in some cases, beyond it) shows little sign of going away… and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the very best thing about all these awards. I’m much less bothered by who wins than I am by the discussions they generate about the winners, the losers and the utterly overlooked.

But I was thinking perhaps I should start some sort of Futurismic annual-awards-type-of-thing, if only because our reader demographic here is skewed rather more away from regular fandom (if there can be said to be any such thing) than many other genre webzines. What do you think? Suggestions for categories and nominees more than welcome – pipe up in the comments. 🙂

Blasphemous Geometries

The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse: Modern Warfare and Bad Company

2 Comments

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

###

“Welcome to the Desert of The Real” announces Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus as he introduces The Matrix’s (1999) Neo to images of the charred remains of what was once human civilisation. A civilisation that has since been digitised and placed online while the real world crumbles beneath an ash grey sky. Morpheus’ drily ironic line would later be re-invented by the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹľek in an essay prompted by the September 11th attack upon the World Trade Center. Ĺ˝iĹľek’s point is a simple one : The 9/11 attacks destroyed not only some buildings, but also America’s conception of what the real world was really like. Since the end of the Cold War, the West had fallen into a cocoon of smugness created by the comforting belief that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all opposition to liberal democracy had simply dried up and blown away; that, as the Berlin Wall came down, Humanity found itself united in the same set of desires for elected governments, human rights and consumer goods – desires for the kind of things that the American people had. It was, as Francis Fukuyama put it, The End of History. Continue reading The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse: Modern Warfare and Bad Company →

Blog

The Worst Science Fiction Series EVAR.

5 Comments

Sorry for things still running at reduced capacity here at Futurismic, but I’ve rather a lot on my plate right now, and that looks to continue until after Easter at the earliest (though I’m busy over Easter weekend because of Eastercon, which is a nice sort of busy by comparison to the rest).

But I don’t want y’all to get bored, so I’m going to do my best to do a few posts a day just pointing to interesting stuff elsewhere… skipping my usual discursive and directionless rambles, in other words! So try this one for size: after seeing some other website list Asimov’s Foundation series as the pinnacle of written science fiction, Ian Sales has compiled a retaliatory list of the ten worst science fiction book series, books “whose label as science fiction embarrasses me, whose continuing popularity puzzles me, and whose fans I feel deserve a smack upside the head with a very large and nail-studded cluebat.”

I still hold a soft spot for the Pern novels (as they were my road-to-Damascus sf texts as a child), but I’m not ashamed to agree with a lot of Ian’s other selections. What about you? Which of Ian’s picks would you rescue from the sin-bin, and which series would you add to the list?

Blog

Quicklinkage: writers on writing, Godin on slush

3 Comments

Some quick links collected in a spare segment of a manic Monday, in lieu of our usual fare (i.e. me waffling on about stuff): here are some science fiction writers going all meta on our arses and writing about writing:

And to close up with a topic for discussion, here’s Seth Godin’s take on the oft-reported death of the slush pile:

If you have something good, really good, what’s it doing in the slush pile?

Bring it to the world directly, make your own video, write your own ebook, post your own blog, record your own music.

Or find an agent, a great agent, a selective agent, one that’s almost impossible to get through to, one that commands respect and acts as a filter because after all, that’s what you’re seeking, a filtered, amplified way to spread your idea.

But slush?

Good riddance.

What do you think: is this a case of Godin just not understanding the way fiction publishing works, and hence applying an inappropriate business model to it? Or is he prophesying the unavoidable future of fiction publishing? Your thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.

Today's Tomorrows

We are all Ponce: The Quest for Longevity

4 Comments

When I was very little, some early-grade teacher lost in the mists of memory told me the story of how Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon spent much of his life searching for the Fountain of Youth. Now that I’m approaching one of those decade birthdays, I can finally relate. Besides, as the leading edge of the baby boom starts retiring, this seems like a good time to take a peek at the science around longevity. Continue reading We are all Ponce: The Quest for Longevity →