Recent posts tagged science fiction
2023
12 Monkeys
Terry Gilliam's paranoid time-travel labyrinth is less an SF film than a story of the fear of madness, but no less powerful for it
The Unasked And Unseen Questions
Science fiction and fantasy are like any other fictional mode: they're only as good as the presumptions brought to them.
2022
Knock It Off, Criswell
Why I find the obsession with "prescience" in science fiction to be misguided.
Imagine That
Over the course of my life I've emigrated from one kind of imagination to another -- from just "making things up" to seeing what we have in front of us in a new way.
Labels, Labels, Labels
I don't particularly care if my SF is hard, soft, or mushy; I care whether or not I give a darn about who's in it and what happens.
Fantfacy [sic]
On the presence of inarticulate, inexpressive prose -- "Engfish" -- in SF&F.
The Fine Art Of The Center-Eligible Play And Other Cheats
On cheating in a work of fantasy or SF.
The Human Use Of Human Beings, And All That
What are people for in SF&F? To show us what's possible, and to show how that's possible right here, not just "out there somewhere."
Here, Now, Nowhere
On using Zen Buddhist notions of time in writing SF&F.
A Clear(er) Head For The Future
What Zen taught me about writing SF&F, part 1.
Magpie Mind Power
With every story set in a strange new world, give yourself as many individual elements of wonderful strangeness to draw on.
Misery Index, 2022 Edition (And Earlier)
The story of a never-written project that made me realize why I don't want to rub the misery of our moment in people's faces and call that art.
In The Right Spirit
More notes on writing SF&F, as a Buddhist- and Zen-influenced author.
Knots Within Knots
The job of a storyteller should not be to make things complex, but to find common threads in complex things. Doubly so in SF&F.
Arrival
An actual SF movie, not just a tarted-up shoot-'em-up, both because of the breadth of its ideas and how they are lovingly personalized.
2021
The Impossible Immutable
In a story that spans multiverses and multi-selves, do we even need to talk about a "self"?
The Future Is A Hodgepodge
If there is a "throughline" for our moment in time, it's not something that condenses itself down to the kind of overarching planning found in fiction.
Dune (1984) [2021 review]
The mere fact that David Lynch's Dune was made at all, and in the Hollywood of the early 1980s to boot, is something of a miracle. Would that it was a better adaptation of the source material, or just a better movie, period.
Fringe Benefits
In a field that's trend-driven, all the most interesting and truly groundbreaking work can only come from the fringes.
The Great Maybe
Skepticism of one's own positions is difficult to cultivate, in big part because the rest of the world openly defies us to doubt ourselves constructively.
Let's Blow This Popsicle Stand
When you are faced with a world this chaotic and nasty, is the only sane response to reject it wholesale?
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's ingenious micro-budget debut, twenty-plus years later, holds up better than some of his bigger-budgeted efforts
Untold Influences (2021 Edition)
The books that made me -- specifically, the SF and fantasy books.
I Love Maria
A kooky example of science fiction from Hong Kong, a cinematic world that has relatively little SF to begin with.
The Matrix
Twenty years later, the Wachowskis' digital fable still stands tall, outliving the slickness of the moment and attempts to misappropriate it
