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science fiction
Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia
This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, film, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause …
THOSE MYTHOLOGICAL MEN AND THEIR SACRED, SUPERSONIC FLYING TEMPLES
From this anxiety of imitation, it is a short step to seeking authenticity in texts from the past, even if one of those texts is itself a modern imitation. The effect is further magnified by a narrowly instrumental education, the shrinking of public debate, the subservience of media to business …
Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore …
How come so many UK leftists are Trots?
In Terry Bisson’s interview with Ken MacLeod in The Human Front (PM Press, 2013), there’s this great answer to Bisson’s question “How come so many UK leftists are Trots?” : Short answer: because Trotskyists in Britain moved fast on the CP’s crisis in the 1950s, and moved with the times …
Space Aliens Against Zionism
It’s tempting to make some snide comment about the colonizer needing the colonized to explain to them the meaning of their own movies. But you don’t need to have your ear to the ground to hear that that’s (one half of) the buzz around Avatar. More true would be the …
Perdido Street Station
i have only read two of China Mieville’s steampunk novels, and whaddya know my favourite of the two – Perdido Street Station – is on offer as a free download from suvudo. it’s an incredibly imaginative story set in a magical city modeled somewhat on Victorian London, where our heroes …
Future Histories
i’ve been thinking about what we call “historical knowledge” quite a bit these days, all the while chewing my way through my annual summer treat, the two “years best” annual science fiction anthologies (Gardner Dozois’ and Hartwell & Cramer’s respectively).Historical knowledge is taken as something of a given, and for …
Heads Up: The People of Sand and Slag
As readers of this blog should know, one of the things that make me happiest in life in science fiction. This is tenuously related to my politics, but like all cultural/aesthetic passions, there is a lot more than just that. What kind of art (yeah, and stories are art) one …