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Space Helmet

Good reads: "The City," by Ray Bradbury →

I mean, gosh, this is just an imperfectly-OCRed version of the story, and if you really want to see the real thing by all means pick up the book. But even here, reading off this Scribd document on a glowing computer screen, I am transported back fifteen years to the dusty Hardin County library, where I pulled down a book of Bradbury stories off the shelf and sat on one of those metal wheeled library stools and just read.

Bradbury always makes me miss the musty-sweet smell of that building’s old air conditioner, the claustrophobic science fiction stacks on the second floor, and the way the thick old walls would slow summer afternoons to a crawl. It’s ironic that a forward-thinking science fiction writer could create such a sense of nostalgia, but then Bradbury’s magic always leads back to childhood somehow, to stillness, to the sense that the world is a much larger and stranger place than we give it credit for.

Good reads: "The Truth and All Its Ugly," by Kyle Minor →

Imagine my surprise when I started reading this fantastic short story by Kyle Minor after it came up on my RSS reader.

The setting seemed eerily familiar at first — close-knit Appalachian families in a near-future SF setting. But then things started moving closer and closer to home — the University of Kentucky, and stone fences built by slaves, and Sonic burger, and Man O’ War neighborhoods near the Lexington airport, and Keeneland — I was completely taken aback. Seriously, it was kind of creepy to see my neighborhood pop up out of the blue like that. (Not to mention the climax scenes at the Lexington Green shopping center, which I had just visited. Granted, New Circle Road is called “the Loop,” which I haven’t heard, but that can pass.)

And a knock-out SF ending. You don’t know what’s coming until it does, and then it punches the reader in the gut.

It’s not Danny. It’s not Danny.

I’m going to have to find more stuff by this author, because this story is amazing. (via The Rumpus)

Mythologist of Our Age →

Slate’s Nathaniel Rich has an appreciation of the work of Ray Bradbury, who will turn 90 soon. Now would be a good time to reread a story or two. (via The Rumpus)

Genres of Fiction, and Why They Aren’t Discrete Entities →

Rachel Swirsky, guestblogging for Jeff VanderMeer, explains a common problem for SF fans and writers: any SF that is also good literature gets reassigned away from the category of SF — leaving only the “bad stuff” as true SF. (On the other hand, this goes both ways: many SF fans won’t touch literary fiction. It’s too “boring.”)

The comments are very instructive as well. (A rarity!) VanderMeer, Swirsky, and author Nick Mamatas all have good things to say.

Obama Depressed, Distant Since 'Battlestar Galactica' Series Finale →

The Onion, of course. This is absolutely perfect. (via epippen)

Trailer for Puzmi, from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival

A dystopia with shades of THX-1138 and Moon. Looks very cool. (via Wired’s Underwire blog)

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. "

Ray Bradbury (via booklover)

"Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties."

Neil Gaiman in The New Yorker’s Ask the Author. As Robin Sloan says, the most interesting part is the “confluence” of art in the 21st century: the breaking down of barriers between high and low.

"To this I say, find me anything at all dumbed down about Ursula K. LeGuin. Show me oafishness in Phil K. Dick. Show me how E. Annie Proulx understands human nature better than Ray Bradbury does."

Jason Henninger, writing a rant about literary vs. speculative fiction on Tor.com.

Henninger’s post rehashes an old argument: “genre” fiction isn’t good literature, and any time a literary critic likes a piece of genre fiction it’s often explained as not really being genre fiction at all. (See, for example, The Road, Slaughterhouse Five, etc.)

Previously on Lost : What?

Lost returns Feb. 2. Cannot wait. (via johnaugust, via chriszabriskie)

A History of 16 Science Fiction Classics, Told In Book Covers →

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 this,too).

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.

"Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: “I checked out with K19 on Abadabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.” They pay brisk money for this crap?"

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.