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The Many Americas of ’90s Sci-Fi: Babylon 5 as SF of the Present
I recently re-watched Babylon 5 as a precursor to diving back into SF&F story-writing (after taking a month off to work on humanist essays and podcast prep for a project launching in November). The following is a reflection on what our SF legacies can teach us not just about the genre and its histories, but…
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On an Insect, a Rock, and Maybe a Human Being
1 Half a cockroach lies twitching at one side of the shower. A season of thunderstorms has sweetened the building’s pipes, driving her kind inward and up. Periplaneta americana seems more elegant somehow in Colombia: an outcome, perhaps, of the more evenly temperate weather shaping its behaviour, cultivating stately indolence. On the rare occasion when…
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Classic Sci-Fi in Clarkesworld April 2021
I enjoy reviewing Clarkesworld on an issue-by-issue, because there’s plenty to learn from quality curation of today’s SF&F, and Clarke’s organization of stories and related content into even more thought-provoking wholes more than meets that requirement. Clarkesworld tends to range between hard sci-fi to lyrical sci-fi, with horror and fantasy more often showing up in…
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How We Move Our Stories Forward: Thoughts on Snyder’s Justice League
When Zack Snyder shot to directorial prominence with his second film, 300 (2006), and entrenched his popularity with Watchmen (2009), he became centred in a downright ugly cultural discourse. These films strove to adapt Epic, Thought-Provoking graphic novels with great fealty — and visually, often succeeded, right down to matching shot-for-shot how parts of each…
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Writing Futures from the Present
Lately I’ve been processing the strong possibility that I won’t get to keep my new home in Colombia (at least, not full-time for a few years), and it’s been difficult to focus on writing in the middle of this grief. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that I’m currently working on my entry for Grist’s…
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A Little More Conversation: Why We Need More Literary Discourse Like Ray Nayler’s New Interview Series
If the individual was melancholic, then the whole world was melancholic as well, the Baroque understanding of melancholia declared, but the reverse was also true: if the world was melancholic, then every single person had to be melancholic. … Corresponding to the mixing of the four humors, four kinds of melancholia could arise, [Robert] Burton…
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Summary Reviews: Clarkesworld, March 2021
As part of my ongoing study of others’ editorial practices, I usually share capsule reviews of the stories and articles in Clarkesworld each month on Twitter. Right now, though, I’m off Twitter while addressing legal-status anxiety, so I’m going to run those capsule reviews here instead. The aim is to distill each piece so that…
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Lessons from Lessing: In Search of My Golden Notebook
I can’t remember who recommended Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) to me as a teen, but I read it during a period when I was glutting myself on mid-20th-century British authors (Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble being two other stand-outs; Beryl Bainbridge, I’d meet only in my late 20s). The Golden Notebook is most…
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Reading in Context: Cultural Backdrop for Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006)
A few weeks ago, a Twitter conversation about Ray Nayler’s new series of author-chats launched a surprising confluence of SF&F-community excitement around Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006). This book, which explores a first-contact scenario that asks serious questions about human consciousness and its relative cosmic value, won a handful of nominations when it was published —…
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Fumigative Futures: A Companion Piece for “Mercy and the Mollusc”
I was in-transit from Medellín to Bello, rushing from one appointment to the next, when I noticed the launch-announcement for my latest novelette at Clarkesworld, “Mercy and the Mollusc”: a meditative space western involving a man and a giant… well, mollusc. Amusingly, too, the announcement arrived within minutes of receiving a rejection for “Fumigative Futures”,…
Sí, Hay Futuros Ediciones 