Sci-Fi novels

[polystyle]

The Road the movie ...

Looks like it will come out soon , in Nov. here in the States
Viggo M plays the father

 

[ripley]

Y
Others:
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, and in the alternative history category, The Years of Rice and Salt (World history if the black death had wiped out essentially all of europe--yay!)
Ursula K LeGuin - The Dispossesed.

Just started reading the Year of Rice and Salt. my, it's good! really, really good.
I'm a sucker for alternate history done right (Yiddish Policeman's Union too)

 

[Agent]

reading Pattern Recognition for a cultural studies class. it's interesting the way Gibson blends science fiction and the historical novel (it's set in 2002). There really isn't a past or future so time is in suspension. It becomes an abstract model that can be reproduced ad infinitum. Really interesting the way Gibson argues for an end of psychogeographic space after 9/11. Time in the historical sense seems to feed on an event's presence in a boundaried topology.

Farenheit 451
Kenji Siratori
Mark Leyner
Storming the Reality Studio
Debug
Vurt
Cryptonomicon
Raoul Hausmann (sp?)
JG Ballard

 

[Agent]

William Gibson recently wrote an article for New Scientist about the future of science fiction. I thought this bit was interesting, something i've been thinking about for a while:

When I was twelve, I wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. Today, I'm not sure I ever really became one. I suspect I was already something else when I began - probably what Donald Theall (1928-2008) defined as "paramodernist", meaning any cultural text that is neither modern nor postmodern, but can be classified as either/both). I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future".

Theall was McLuhan's only PhD student. He is probably the best art/literary critic in terms of connecting radical modernism (late Joyce, Kafka, Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, etc.) to postmodern science fiction and media studies. He cites Deleuze more than McLuhan though.

 

[polystyle]

Gibson's quote rings accurate, glad to hear him nail what he's done ...
Thanks AN

 

[faustus]

William Gibson recently wrote an article for New Scientist about the future of science fiction.

thanks for that. i'm just zooming through 'burning chrome' at the moment

 

[BareBones]

just read that "the stars my destination" is being made into a film... apparently from the producer of transformers, doom, and constantine.

oh dear.

 

[jd_]

Jumper took fairly liberally from The Stars My Destination so maybe it paved the way. It'll be interesting, I guess, to see if they keep the main guy so unlikable and stupid. I don't know if anyone's made a movie about a guy like that intentionally.

 

[jenks]

Just started reading the Year of Rice and Salt. my, it's good! really, really good.
I'm a sucker for alternate history done right (Yiddish Policeman's Union too)

Just finished Yiddish and thought it should be up there with those great alternative histories like Dick's High Tower (in fact I think it felt more realised than Dick but that's kinda heresy round these parts!)

 

[luka]

is it? i thought every agreed that high tower is the laziest least compelling of all dicks wrok and most people tried to forget it even exists.

 

[jenks]

I dunno - according to the Dick thread started ages ago there is much love for it here -

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=220&highlight=high+castle

I prefered Ubik and Flow my Tears but I am yet to be convinced I am reading truly great stuff when i read him. But, then again, I'm not a Sci-Fi expert and any I've read has been based on recommendations here.

And, sorry - I called it High Tower when in fact it is High Castel, sorry.

 

[jonny mugwump]

Theall was McLuhan's only PhD student. He is probably the best art/literary critic in terms of connecting radical modernism (late Joyce, Kafka, Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, etc.) to postmodern science fiction and media studies. He cites Deleuze more than McLuhan though.

So, where is the best place to find out about his definition of paramodernism then- does anybody know? This has me very intrigued...

 

[Agent]

this is a good resource for donald theall and the kind of school that developed around McLuhan's literary criticism: http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce/

he defines it somewhere in a book called 'james joyce's techno-poetics' but "beyond the word" is much better (kind of hard to find). Paramodern is basically: Dada, Surrealism, Duchamp, Klee, Joyce, Beckett, Eistenstein, Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Franz Kafka etc. The best i can offer is that it deals with random mutations (in perception and cognition) in new technological environments.

also the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, sound poets, john cage, etc. theall is a fun read, very dense and interconnected:

If Duchamp's The Large Glass (1914) marks a turning-point in the marriage of art, science and technology, Joyce's major new directions in and revisions of the style of Ulysses (1919) marks the moment of his moving toward his complex merger of narrative, science, mathematics, technology and poetics in Finnegans Wake. While Apollinaire, Tzara, Duchamp, and Picabia had noted the value of the transgressive potency of the "pun" in their new "playful science" of the new post-electric arts, Joyce consciously set out to develop the polyvalent, polysemic "pun" using it along with grammar (traditional grammatica, early linguistics and semiotics), mathematics and mnemonic theory to achieve the "abnihilisation of the etym."4 While the efforts of these artists's and of Joyce may initially seem far removed from questions of digitalisation, virtuality or hypertextuality today, they actually contribute to an understanding of the social, artistic, intellectual and practical (i.e., applied) contexts leading to their development. In discussions of art and technology in the 1960s and after, Duchamp, Max Ernst and others stand as figures on the road to the MIT Media Lab, for at the root of the evolution of digital, artificial or virtual reality (i.e., cyberspace) are the early post-electric visions of synaesthesia, of the "orchestration [or integration] of the arts" and of the networks of connections and allusions to other arts, science and technology.5

i have to reiterate, dangerous territory, haha: http://www.disambiguatebob.com/

 

[jonny mugwump]

thats wonderful nucleus- thanks alot

 

[droid]

I dunno - according to the Dick thread started ages ago there is much love for it here -

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=220&highlight=high+castle

I prefered Ubik and Flow my Tears but I am yet to be convinced I am reading truly great stuff when i read him. But, then again, I'm not a Sci-Fi expert and any I've read has been based on recommendations here.

And, sorry - I called it High Tower when in fact it is High Castel, sorry.

I think High Castle is rated primarily because of the way the plot mirrors and inverts Dick's own reality.

In the book, the main character discerns the existence of another (real world) reality through the I-ching, which leads him to the author of an alternative history (real history) who is a fictional version of Dick.

In the real world, Dick used the I-Ching to create the book - so the book as a whole is in an inverted version of Dicks' own reality. He's using the I ching to create a fictional world, the fictional characters in the book use the I-ching to perceive the real world...

Never had much time for Ubik - it should have stayed a short story. Best of his work for me is Valis...

 

[ripley]

thought I'd update that as Robinson's _Years of Rice and Salt_ moves closer to present day it gets less and less good.

Finding his treatment of Africans and sub-Saharan Africa to be really disturbing, his discussion of Islam problematic (especially in that his discussion of Islam in a world where they have been the dominant empire still ascribes to Islam the same attitudes that people decry in the real world today, something that seems unlikely to me) and other stuff rings less holistically true

is this just a function of me being more familiar with and invested in more current day dynamics and more willing to put up with generalities about shit from ages ago? did anyone else read this?

anyway the first 500 pages are still great, so that's enough of a good book to go on with..

 

[Agent]

i'm writing a dissertation about postmodern horror and science fiction. could anyone recommend an anthology besides Storming the Reality Studio? the main writers i'm looking at are: william s. burroughs, jg ballard, william gibson, joyce, rimbaud, pynchon, nabokov, franz kafka, baudelaire, poe, edward dorn, lee kwo, kenji siratori, etc. as far as theory the focus is on walter benjamin, guy debord, deleuze, heidegger, merleau-ponty and mcluhan. i'm trying to establish paramodernism as an alternative to post-structuralism for cultural studies/literary criticism. it will be around 150-200 pages.

Gibson is probably the biggest name to attach himself to paramodernism. Marjorie Perloff, Eric McLuhan (Marshall's son), Louis Armand, Nelson Thall, and Darren Tofts are excellent writers also. Tofts wrote an essay for HJC called Whenabouts in the Name of Space worth checking out:

commentators from William Gibson to Michael Heim frequently describe Finnegans Wake as an exemplar of hypertext. Ted Nelson, too, has drawn attention to the literary characteristics of the medium; indeed, his most famous axiom, "everything is deeply intertwingled", is distinctly Wakeian. Joyce's exploitation of equivocation is well recognised as a method of dreamwork. But it is less well known as a form of electronic thought, of hyperlogic. Joyce extended verbal freeplay to such a degree that his language space becomes a manifestation of the marvelous, the phantasmagoric [...] The inclusiveness made possible by the Wake in this respect makes Lautreamont's chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table seem positively banal. We can learn also learn a lot about the concept of extension from the Wake, for its systematic patterns of self-reference create the dense, web-like organization of information ("messes of mottage") (FW 183) that we associate with the term "network".

 

[droid]

I assume you've read 'House of Leaves'?

 

[Agent]

yeah i really liked House of Leaves. I tried to read something else by Daniewlski (Revolutions i think) but it didn't make sense. Kenji Siratori is easier to read. I should probably add DeLillo, PKD, and David Foster Wallace (wtf?), but only read half of Infinite Jest, and an essay on David Lynch (for Rolling Stone) and grammar (for the Atlantic i think)

 

[jambo]

Dick-wise I think The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is his best novel. Also prefer The Divine Invasion and The Tranmigration of Timothy Archer to Valis as books, although Valis probably contains the most explicit account of his weltanschauung.

Some great recommendations here no doubt but I feel with sci-fi you can't be too much of a literary snob, that's one thing PKD understood, pulp is a vital part of the genre.