“’Books are worthless,’ Abrenuncio said with good humor.” – from Of Love and Other Demons. It is hard to resist the pull of hagiographic adulation [...]
Not long ago there was an acrimonious discussion online of what constituted “being a fan” of Science Fiction that focused in great measure on what one did or did [...]
“The way things happen, not the great movements of time but the ordinary things that make us what we are, the savage accidents of our births, the simple lusts that [...]
“If there is one single message we should take from science fiction, it is that the imagination has an unspeakably important role to play in solving the problems of our [...]
“Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.” – Karen [...]
“Most terrible about the dead was the way in which they did not, could not, could never, could never even hope to change.” Joanna Russ, from “Poor Man, [...]
“What makes SF compelling is not the ‘sense of wonder’ it can generate or its unmooring from reality, but that it creates a sort of lyrical transgression [...]
“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I [...]
“Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the [...]
“Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.” – Albert Camus “There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. [...]
I’ve been reading a lot about reading recently, and it struck me the other day that a lot of the scientific research on the topic (at least, what I have read so far) [...]
“It is unfortunate to me that we have to classify reading fiction as anything other than what it is. Why must it be escaping “from” something? If it has to be [...]
“By ‘exhaustion’ I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or [...]
“[R]eading is as much a strategic enterprise as the work itself. To read, then, is to engage in one set of strategies in order to decipher another set.” – [...]
I enjoy following debates both large and small about the vitality or exhaustion of genre fiction; they can tell you a lot about how literature is received and related to by [...]
“Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible [...]
“All fantastic genres make some use of fictive neology. Heroic fantasy invents words to evoke the archaic origins of its worlds. Phantasmagoric satire delights in [...]