Akopos

The Guardian has a brief introduction to the Steampunk genre of SF writing. Two things that I’ve noticed:

1. Steampunk as a reaction to our growing alienation from technology and science. As both have grown more incomprehensible and remote (I’m looking at you, quantum mechanics), many SF readers have wanted, I think,  to revisit a clockwork universe whose fundamental forces were comprehensible to all– Gear A triggers Lever B which in turn releases Spring C… etc. A critical element of Steampunk is the notion of amateurism, a longing for a time when individuals without industrial resources could still engage science and technology at a fundamental level.

2. Nostalgia for a more elegant time. At SF conventions, steampunk cosplay has cut into the Star Trek and Star Wars duopoly.  The clothes, the jewelry, the hairstyles– all reflect a hand-made ethic and whimsy unconfined by franchise “brands.” What’s especially interesting is how women have embraced the genre, both in style and creation.

via The Guardian:

Steampunk culture: an introduction

A genre of books, films and games, steampunk is set in the world of Victorian science-fiction. The science-obsessed Victorians were the first to create speculative fantasies about what we might be able to achieve with technology: HG Wells’s The Time Machine, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

A great article on a Muslim Brit’s experience trying to overcome his fear of dogs, a cultural issue some Americans have exploited here in the USA. It’s also very funny (as most stories involving a bulldog tend to be).

via The Guardian:

Dogs: face to face with my worst enemy
Many Muslims, growing up in devout households, are taught that dogs are dirty and scary. So could Sarfraz Manzoor learn to love Cookie the bulldog?

I like this list not so much because I agree with it (Safran Foer? Poets? Kinda insular, dude, but spot on with Amy Tan) but because it shows that he cares about literature enough to give a damn. Tepid criticism and tepid praise are for tepid readers and who the fuck cares about them?

Looking forward to his post on Underrated American Writers.

via Huffington Post:

The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers (PHOTOS)

If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism. They are uneasy with mortality. On the great issues of the day they are silent (especially when they seem to address them, like William T. Vollmann). They desire to be politically irrelevant, and they have succeeded. They are the unreadable Booth Tarkingtons, Joseph Hergesheimers, and John Herseys of our time, earnestly bringing up the rear.

In addition to being a writer, China Miéville is a rigorous thinker (he holds a PhD in International Relations from The London School of Economics) and an astute dissector of gnarly political issues. His latest post uses Naomi Campbell’s involvement with Charles Taylor and “blood diamonds” as an entry to discuss broader issues of political/economic self-interest and moral complicity.

from rejectamentalist manifesto:

Blood & Ice

Without question many funds raised by these unspeakably valuable rocks funnel into the coffers of butchers, amputators, despots & murderers. Without question it would be better were such activities not bankrolled. By anything. Nonetheless, a moment of critical hesitation is necessary. Moralised politico-economic concepts do not necessarily go viral through fractal vigour nor heuristic rigour. More often than not they are the result of aggressive marketing campaigns. Certainly there may ultimately be conflicts over the concrete content of any such category, which may or may not open space for alternative investigation. Nonetheless when any such concept reaches a critical mass of unquestioned authority, in particular when deployed by the semi-official & official arbiters of the legitimate political agenda, it does not automatically invalidate it, but it should red-flag it for attention.

Accordingly, a few questions.

From The Guardian:

Literary last words
Terry Breverton selects some of literature’s most memorable farewells, from Samuel Johnson to James Joyce

EMILY DICKINSON 1830 – 1886
‘I must go in, the fog is rising’
Dickinson’s health declined sharply over the last years of her life, until she finally became confined to her bed and was only able to write brief notes. According to her niece, Martha, her ‘briefest last message’ was reminiscent of ‘an oft-repeated family caution, “it was already growing damp”.’ Her physician gave the cause of death as Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment now called nephritis

The Passage was a fun read– sharp prose, engrossing plot, maybe too large a cast of characters. Part 2 of of Justin Cronin’s trilogy will be called The Twelve. Good interview w/ the author over at io9.

Justin Cronin explains his vampires in “The Passage,” and drops spoilers for the next book

If I was going to place these characters in a great deal of jeopardy and send them across the continent, where many would die, I had to earn the right to do that to them. And you earn that by giving them the full dignity of their humanity. Who are you? You live in a town you have friends and connections and associations. [In my book] it’s a medieval town – life is short, brutal and brief. The meaning of having a child isn’t sentimentalized. Marriage is a big question. And yet the arrangement of the community is familial, domestic. I had to do some world building. A lot of time [books like this are] about technology and physical circumstances. Well [my characters] have very little technology and the physical world is simple. So I had to create this social matrix, this lifeboat, which has continued with stability through an apocalypse. These people have found a way to exist socially that’s resilient.

For the most part what’s left are the good people. Unconsciously that was what I was advocating for. In this particular community, which was based on domestic patterns, they survived. I’m holding that up as a virtue. It’s a source of their courage too. You gain your courage via your connection to other people.

I read JG Ballard’s Concrete Island when I was 16. It was a sly and frightening novel that gave me nightmares. Read High Rise, same result– like anxiety dreams, the grim consumer artifices and sinister blandness of Ballard’s landscapes evoked a smothering sense of dissolution and creeping entropy.

Ballard disdained optimistic notions of futurism except as fetish, instead exploring familiar places made strange: Deserted airfields on a dying planet. The cracked plastic veneers of abandoned “smart homes”. Swimming pools filled with stagnant water, creeping vines. “The modern landscape as a collective dream, in which internal drives were transposed to the external world and ‘the ragged skyline of the city… resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’”.

from Telegraph.co.uk:

Inside JG Ballard’s archive
Following the British Library’s recent acquisition of the JG Ballard archive, Tim Martin has been given exclusive access to the manuscripts. He traces the evolution of the daring and highly original author of Crash

A scene from the film Crash (1997)

Even diehard Ballardians may grunt and shuffle when asked what the word Ballardian actually means, though the staff at Collins had a good try with “dystopian modernity” and “bleak man-made landscapes” when they admitted it to their dictionary. Few, though, will deny that the most memorable things about these unforgettably odd novels are their environments.

Trailer for Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s (The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans) 2005 novel.

From N+1 magazine (spoilers at link):

In honor of the upcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, we’re posting online, for the first time ever, Marco Roth’s Issue 4 review of Ishiguro’s novel and Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island.

* The article is well written and thoughtful but the author, in trying to understand Ishiguro’s body of work, neglects to include Ishiguro’s difficult but perhaps finest novel, The Unconsoled. This omission undermines (or at least leaves incomplete) Roth’s discussion of Ishiguro’s thematic concerns. -DYG

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Prime Number.

My mother sent me a flyer for a self-help group.  I’d come back from work, the dense, chemical tang of bug spray in my hair and on my clothes, and there was a small note attached to the flyer that said, “Give this a chance, Oscar.  You can meet lots of people who work just as good as you, who do without and deserve to be happy.”  I put it in the drawer of my desk and sat on the couch and tried to forget about it for a little while, though I knew I’d end up going.  I was getting desperate.

The group was called Missing Ourselves, and it met every week at the community center in Birmingham, two and a half hours south of where I was living.  The group was for people who had lost pieces of themselves, arms or legs or even just a finger, and were trying to cope with this as best as they could.  It sounded like AA for amputees, but I memorized the address, time, and room number, and spent the next few days spraying houses for termites and trying not to get too excited.