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 […]
I have devoured this week Iain M. Banks’s new Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata (see http://www.iain-banks.net/). As I wrote last year in the post on Surface Detail, I hesitate to recommend his novels either as a mainstream or as an sf novelist for I know this is an acquired taste. I read complaints in Amazon.co.uk […]
I read back-to-back Nicola Griffith’s acclaimed Ammonite (1993), just re-issued as an SF Masterwork, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos (1986), as part of my current search for sf novels with interesting ideas about gender. Back in January I was wondering here whether I’d eventually write a paper on another one of them, David […]
Two years ago, on September 19 2010, I started publishing my ranting and raving on teaching English Literature (and other academic matters) here. I am very much surprised myself by the frequency and regularity of my postings, which now amount to 100,000 words, a long book. Writing this blog, my journal of the plague years […]
A colleague emailed me back in July yet another article on this new phenomenon I’ve been discussing here in fits and starts: the demand that research be freed from the market. This time it was the turn of The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21559317) to announce that “Academic journals face a radical shake-up.” The main arguments are the […]
I am spending a good deal of my holidays reading SF, this time not so much at random and for pleasure but, rather, trying to update my (always tottering…) knowledge of the field in a more systematic fashion. Like any other contemporary genre, SF is fast evolving and it’s very hard to grasp which new […]
My good friend Pere Gallardo from Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona has just organised the first English Studies SF conference in Spain. 18 of us, SF academic fans and shcolars, met last Friday 16 (see the list at http://www.sciencefictionppab.blogspot.com.es/) and promised to stay in touch to meet again in one year’s time at my home […]
I came across David Brin’s Glory Season (1993) while looking for a suitable topic for an oncoming conference on Utopian Studies in Tarragona (see http://wwwa.urv.cat/deaa/utopia/international/home.html). This, a low-tech SF novel about a utopian “feminist nirvana” written by a man, sounded promising enough, backed as it was by its Hugo and Locus nominations (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Season). I […]
It’s taken me a few months to go through the 2,000 pages that compose Robinson’s trilogy about the (hopefully) soon to come colonisation of Mars: Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1992) and Blue Mars (1996). At some point, particularly when the end of the Mars 500 experiment was announced (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_500), I thought that Mars […]
I have spent whatever free time I’ve managed to hoard in the last ten days glued to the 1042 pages of Neal Stephenson’s last novel Reamde. The volume is not only very thick but also trade-paperback size, which means it is huge indeed. I’ve gone through Stephenson’s Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon (twice), The […]