Section
Speculative Fiction
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Reality, as Seen by Godzilla
Perhaps the function of Godzilla is to trouble happily ever after.
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The Monstrous H. P. Lovecraft
Part literary detective story, part Gothic tale, and part fictional biography, Paul La Farge’s enthralling novel The Night Ocean is composed of the formal hybrids and …
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What It Feels Like When Your World Ends
The increasingly popular genre recently christened “cli-fi,” or climate change fiction, tends to move from the outside in: as the environment deteriorates …
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Miéville’s Surreal Weapons
In his rambling 2011 photo-essay “London’s Overthrow,” composed in the lead-up to the London Olympics, China Miéville takes his reader through the ever-changing, history-drenched streets of his beloved city …
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My Neighbor Octavia
For years, I knew Octavia E. Butler, the famed African American science fiction and fantasy writer, by her first name only. That was the way she introduced herself when I first met her back in the fall of 1999 …
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Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be suitors through an online dating site known as Lovability. The series of awkward exchanges met with gentle scoffs and knowing laughter from the assembled audience. As social…
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Trouble in Lovecraft Country
Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country drops into the world of science-fiction and horror publishing at an interesting time. The fandom around this culture is arcane and probably irremediably nerdy to outsiders, but even “mundanes” (non-fans) must have registered something of the huge boom in Lovecraftian horror that has plumed out through film, TV, and videogames…
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Speculative Pulp Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series,” a sequence of interconnected stories published gradually over the course of a year, which Atwood claimed was an attempt to revive a literary tradition of serialization popular…
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Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets …
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Jeffrey Combs’s Re-Animator
The first scene of the Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult classic Re-Animator shows us our lead, our anti-hero protagonist, in a state of panic. In the halls of the stately University of Zurich, Herbert West has experimented on his mentor, who is now a screaming, pulsating aberration, a physical monstrosity. West, played by stage actor Jeffrey…
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Ghost in the System
It’s fitting that a videogame about novels and their authorship manages to marry two media long thought to be polar opposites. Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance, available for free, for iPad and Windows, on their website, is a story-based game that requires a real printed-and-bound book in order to play. In an age…
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The Novel in the Age of Digital Diversion
In The End of Absence, an alternately shrewd and sentimental account of Internet-age distraction, author Michael Harris offers an autobiographical parable: once a lonely pre-tech teenager obsessed with fantasy novels, the now 30-something Harris finds he’s lost his ability to read more than a few pages without stopping to check his phone. Frustrated, he resolves…
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Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
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Technological Citizenship at the End of the World
Technology, we like to say, is making us antisocial; truncating our attention spans; addicting us; depleting our fossil fuels. This commonplace ignores and undermines the people who develop our technologies, and exonerates the people whose use (or abuse) of tech ostensibly reveals their (our!) human frailties. This is doubly problematic. Engineers are people. The technological…
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Le Guin’s Anarchist Aesthetics
What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining Ursula Le Guin. I can only speak for one childhood—and one adulthood—spent reading Le Guin, but I’d bet my last nickel there are thousands of us out there. Tolkien knew how to conquer Evil; Beverly Cleary and Louise Fitzhugh put…
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Drought Lit
For the last several summers I’ve spent August in the Central Valley of California, swimming twice a day and eating guacamole for dinner. During the same last few years, the state’s drought, already worse than the records had ever seen, has intensified. The reservoirs are 20 percent full; the last mud puddles have evaporated off…
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Searching for Purpose
Near-extinction stories are nearly as old as the human species, from Noah’s flood to 20th-century narratives about nuclear holocaust (1950s–60s) and pandemics (1970s–80s), to the current spate of novels and films about environmental disaster. Inevitably, they motivate big questions. Why did this happen? Is there a lesson here? Aside from survival, is there a purpose…
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How Other Halves Live
In disciplines ranging from philosophy to computer science, the term “black box” describes a system that cannot be understood internally, by how it works, but only externally, in terms of its inputs and outputs. Walter Mosley, with his recent science fiction novel Inside a Silver Box, offers a sociopolitical riff on the concept. Although the…
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China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of physics: like the movement of any three objects in space held by each other’s gravitational pull, the movements of these suns defy prediction. Sometimes…
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A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has …
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The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin
When did Ursula Le Guin last cross your radar screen? It could have been her memorable broadside at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony, against Amazon and “commodity profiteers” who “sell us like deodorant.” My favorite line: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”1 If you have…
