Reading the SF novel Teranesia (1999) by Australian novelist Greg Egan, I’m surprised to find an anti-academese critique embedded in a key subplot. The protagonist Prabir, a teenager, and his younger sister Madhusree lose their parents in the first segment of the book. The couple, Indian scientists doing research on a mysterious butterfly in a […]
Charles Stross is an English SF writer, born in Leeds (1964). I have no doubts that he is amongst the most interesting authors in the genre working today, and I am personally developing quite a taste for his dense, clever fiction, of which I’ve gone through four books so far (just the tip of the […]
The cosmopolitan novel, according to Berthold Schoene’s eponymous volume (2009), opposes both the novel limited by the national territory (whether it is nationalist or not), and the post-colonial novel, which questions the very essence of the territorial from a critical position. The cosmopolitan writer has been freed by globalization to write about any theme located […]
If you have already read my posts for the films Battle Los Angeles and Warrior you must already know that I find testosterone-driven Hollywood films very useful to grasp the real state of our current gender discourse, and, thus, correct the utopian drive of (pro-feminist) academic theory. As I have been preaching for the last […]
Sorry about the unimaginative allusion in the title to David Bowie’s wonderful 1980s record (LP, not CD…). What else could I use to recall one of my main childhood terrors? Yes, I’m writing here today about memory and, particularly, about the childhood terrors that remain with us for decades, in this case consciously. Yet, at […]
Dear Iain, As I have narrated here, on the very same day you announced your imminent death of cancer, I had sent an abstract for a conference about your twelfth (and last!) SF novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. The conference is next October, the paper is written, and you were supposed to live until then. Unfortunately, […]
English is an infinitely flexible language and so, the word ‘unwrite’ does exist. Oxford Online ignores it but not Merriam-Webster: “to obliterate from writing: expunge, rescind”. I have also comes across an article by learned Laurence Lerner, “Unwriting Literature” (New Literary History, 22: 3, Summer 1991, 795-815) and an article in, of all places, The […]
I was planning to make something special of my posting number 200 but the unexpected has taken me over. Completely. Today I have sent an abstract for a paper on Iain M. Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), a novel I have discussed here (see 1-XI-2012, LET’S SUBLIME: A POLITICAL READING FOR THE HYDROGEN SONATA). The […]
My colleague Andrew Monnickendam gave a plenary lecture at the last AEDEAN conference on Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778-1818), one of the authors he deals with in his new book The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations (Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone). His presentation of Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) did call my […]
I have spent an unusually quiet day today (pre-storm: 57 exams and 30 exercises are hitting me tomorrow) to prepare a paper for a conference. I have the abstract, I’ve read the book pencil in hand, I thought I could start with the bibliography. I’m talking about a short paper, 2,500 words, for a 20-minute […]