The X-Files, one of the most important television series ever, was launched 30 years ago today, on 10 September 1993. The series, created by Chris Carter, narrated in 218 episodes broadcast along eleven seasons (1993-2002, 2016, 2018), and two films (1998, 2008), the cases investigated by FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully […]
My student Pascal Lemaire is working on a PhD dissertation on the genre of the technothriller and I have asked him for a list of recommended novels, since I am far more familiar with the movies. Technothrillers, as Pascal is discovering, are a conundrum as a genre because although they have millions of readers worldwide, […]
SPOILERS WARNING: This post deals with the nine Expanse novels and discusses the series’ ending. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels—Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)—accompanied by a short […]
When I wrote the post ‘Preparing for Disaster: Reading Post-Apocalyptic Fiction‘ in 2015, Covid-19 was still almost five years away into the future (the virus broke out in China’s city of Wuhan in December 2019, hence its name, but it spread worldwide in early 2020, with a three-month state of alarm and lockdown being declared […]
A couple of weeks ago I gave a lecture for a general audience on women and science fiction, which was also the closing session in a course organized by Jordi-Agustí Font at Badalona’s Espai Betúlia. I was the only woman lecturer in a series of six sessions and, typically, I was asked to lecture on […]
I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes. Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]
The Expanse (2011-2021) is a nine-volume space opera series by James S.A. Corey (the joint penname of the duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), or a ten-volume series if you take into account the book gathering the associated short fiction. The novels have been adapted as a TV series, first by SyFy and later by […]
On September 14, the Spanish Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 led by Ione Belarra, Secretary General of left-wing party Podemos, launched the campaign #BastaDeDistopías [#StopDystopias] to encourage the debate around the current general discouragement, especially among the young. The main piece is a 1-minute video in which various characters are seen in what […]
Genres are never static, this is a basic truth of literary theory. They may appear at a given time, no matter how hard it usually is to pinpoint exactly when, and fade away as readers become less interested. Each genre has its history, whether this is the larger narrative arc of a genre as gigantic […]
The one who should be writing this post today is my PhD student Pascal Lemaire since he has chosen to deal with the technothriller as his topic of research. However, I am myself curious about some of the points he is raising about this genre, so here I am. Back in 2014 Pascal published in […]