November 2009
10 posts
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“If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the...”
– Copenhagenize, writing about The Social Ideology of the Motorcar
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“Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials,...”
– Ursula K. Le Guin (via ilovereadingandwriting, via booklover)
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A History of 16 Science Fiction Classics, Told In... →
io9 shows the varied covers a handful of science fiction classics have borne over the years. (They cheat a little — showing only English editions for some books, while others include foreign editions, which for some reason are much more lurid.) As can be expected, some of the covers are incredibly bad, but mixed in with the pulpy stuff there are some moments of true beauty (and then...
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Call in Sick More Often →
Jamie Ford, author of the NYT bestseller Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, starts with the release of his first novel and traces its development backwards in time for three years, arriving at last at the spark that got it going: calling in sick to write for a day.
Not that I’m really entertaining any ideas about that right now, but — I can at least admit — it’s...
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The Girlfriend Experience And Why We Are All In... →
Andrew Altschul reviews Steven Soderberg’s latest movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Beginning with a critique of the movie’s sordid and pointless plot he soars upwards to a beautiful and damning critique of so-called Realism. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for you, but here’s just a taste:
In Reality we don’t need Laurence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn, we...
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Are our novels being haunted by the housing bust? →
io9 observes that it seems everyone’s writing horror novels about economic downturn and how we’re all now holding onto houses bound up with tons of pain and economic insecurity. Somehow that all translates into ghosts and demons and all sorts of associated hauntings.
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“There’s something inherent in the culture of reading and publishing that...”
– Replacement Press Blog, talking about novellas
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“Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written...”
– Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, writing a letter to his friend H.N Swanson in 1953. Honestly Chandler’s fake-SF is better than a lot of the real stuff.