Douwe Draaisma Machina metafor. Historia pamieci
China Mieville Kraaken
Jeff VanderMeer Third Bear
Roger Luckhurst Science Fiction
I keep seeing the words. Heat, space, stillness, distance. They’ve become visual states of mind. I’m not sure what that means. I keep seeing figures in isolation, I see past physical dimension into the feelings that these words engender, feelings that deepen over time. That’s the other word, time.
I drove and looked. He stayed at [...]
“Reading novels - serious novels, anyhow - is an experience limited to a very small percentage of the so-called enlightened public. Increasingly, it’s going to be a pursuit for those who seek unusual experiences, moral fetishists perhaps, people of heightened imagination, the troubled pursuers of the ambiguous self.” Jerzy Kosinski
“Between story and truth”
Jean-Luc Nancy
One day, the gods retreated. On their own, they retreated from their divinity, that is to say, from their presence. What remains of their presence is what remains of all presence when it absents itself: what remains is what one can say about it. What can be said about it is [...]
“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it [...]
Full text in Polish here.
It is possible then to think about SF not in the bourgeois terms of the novel, but as an experimental science. The object of study is not the ideological reproduction of SF, but a philosophical self-reflection upon these conditions of ideological reproduction. To read is to discover the absolute difference a novel has from its [...]
I bring you life-with. It’s more than love. Love’s a hard, sad, dirty word, a cold word, an old word. It says too much and it promises too little. I bring you something much bigger than love. If you’re alive, you’re alive. If you’re alive-with, then you know the other life is there too—both of [...]
I feel greater than the sum of all my parts
A domestic beast with a hairy heart
Trapped within a walled suburbia
I found my taste is somewhat underground
Between the shadows and the cracks
I’m [...]
Literary forms that helped create the preconditions for the appearance of science fiction as a singular phenomenon in the late 19th century:
* utopian fictions
* fairy tales
* classical myths
* earthly paradises
* folk stories about cockaigne
[...]
[Anamorphosis] is a philosophy of false reality, or, more precisely, a poetics of alternative realities. An anamorphic image posits the coded presence of an almost unimaginable reality that momentarily obtrudes on ideologically constituted reality, thereby rendering it arbitrary, ontologically inconsistent [. . .] The effect of anamorphosis, philosophically speaking, is therefore that of extreme relativisation. [...]
Unfortunately, the stance of Islam on this issue has been grossly misunderstood. It is not true that Islam prohibits pictures and portraits in the absolute sense. Only pictures which cultivate sentiments of worship in people are prohibited. The bases of this view point are presented below:
By collecting and analyzing all the Ahadith on portrait and [...]
Pt. I, Ch. 2, “L.A. Noir and Forgetting”
“there are noir and apocalyptic scenarios that continually repeat in literature, film and the visual arts from Los Angeles. By the mid sixties, they take on an increasingly disengaged spirit, like a nightmare one watches through the windshield of a car” (81).
Pt. V, Ch. 12, “Suburban [...]
He wants to live long enough to witness a news, post-genomic fiction. one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause’s effect. One that, through a kind of collaborative writing, shakes free of the prejudices of any individual maker. For now, fiction remains at best [...]
“You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”
His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in the world. But not if you don’t want it, [...]
Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.
He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in [...]
She wanted him to say something. She wanted him to say it was alright, but more than that she wanted some ridiculous sort of reassurance that somehow it all didn’t matter. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t sunk in. She hoped he wouldn’t hate her, and she could take some relief in that, because [...]
I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight of Los Angeles. I love walking along Sunset Boulevard past the bistros where the Hollywood trash have to brush the black soot off their salmon linguini in white wine sauce before they can eat it. I love driving across one black ring after another all [...]
Because Beau, the only one she would have stayed with, was unclaimable - not all the nights she had spent by his side had let her into him, he would stop at her frontiers, always, or gently stop her at his own - and it was so painful and disorienting that she thought she had [...]
God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee had called the “aquatic horror” shape? It had no shape. Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense, not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on [...]
“—You is from hunger, Mr Bones”
Intense.
James Elkins Six Stories from the End of Representation. Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000
Albert Sanchez Pinol Pandora w Kongu
Michel Faber The Fire Gospel
Richard Powers Generosity. An Enhancement
Quote. Tom Waits is made of awesome. Unquote. Can’t agree more. This IS poetry.
_______________________________________
It’s dreamy weather we’re on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice
I disappear in your name
But you must wait [...]