It always happens…
When you’re way way way way down at the bottom of the writing world, it seems every time you look up, there’s a luminary (or at least someone with better…
Tag: criticism
Science as a Wedge
Back in the day, there were always rumors about big colleges accepting more freshman than the school could handle – but then forcing these wide-eyed fledglings through an intensely difficult…
The Midwife Toad
The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler, focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The personal disputes that…
The Mundane
We have lost our sense of the mundane. That was one of the great things about Philip K. Dick. He didn’t make science fiction about the Space Prince or the…
Snowmobiles of Doom
“Every generation wants to be the last.” That is one of the many mantras repeated throughout Lullaby (like Palahniuk’s own version of “so it goes”) – and that certainly feels…
Damn that Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk does things that should not work. There is a quality to his writing that is prima facie absurd. It shouldn’t work. Kurt Vonnegut was the same way. It…
The Screwfly and the Y
I recently read “The Screwfly Solution” by James Tiptree Jr., although I think it was published under a different psuedonym, Raccoona Sheldon, all pen names for the actual person Alice…
The Death of Skynet’s old, alcoholic uncle… or What will the aliens do?
Some channels quietly switched off their analog signals last month. Maybe one day we will be all digital – but it looks like we will have to wait a little…
The Plague of “Even”
A devil’s bargain in word processing is the quick-find option. David Lodge foresaw this curse in Small World, when his character Frobisher found, through an old-tyme computer, his unwitting penchant…
Character devolution
Who are the best whiners in cinema history? Not whiners like Luke Skywalker, who was going through a standard space farmboy phase, but full-on crybabies, where whining isn’t a phase…