The week is nearly finished and if you are anything like me, that means a little more time messing around on the internet. Let's tumble down the rabbit hole and find out what's new and interesting in the world of speculative fiction and fact!
- Lit Hub rounds up the “heirs of Kafka and Borges” in the article Weird Fiction: A Primer. If you are looking for stories that “shift in unpredictable ways, bridging genres and styles at a moment’s notice, and tell deeply compelling stories that nonetheless confound expectations” then look no further.
- On Electric Lit, Ryan Britt interviews Leslie Jamison and Ryan Spencer about cinematic apocalypses. Spencer and Jamison collaborated on the new book Such Mean Estate which is a photo essay capturing a single frames of disaster movies accompanied by Jamison's essay Catechism for the End of the World. Spencer and Jamison discuss whether apocalyptic film qualifies as high art and how disaster movies make us feel safe.
The cover of Such Mean Estate
- In the category of science fiction becoming fact, Stephen Hawking searches for alien life.
“It’s time to commit to finding the answer; to search for life beyond earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.” said Stephen Hawking who just this week launched a ten year, one-hundred million dollar search for life beyond earth. “It is a huge gamble of course,” says Martin Rees, “but the payoff would be so colossal.”
- For those who eschew genre pigeon-holing this article from Brain Picking’s J.R.R Tolkein on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, an Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”. A quote from Tolkein...
“It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: “this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty.” But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: “this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy”; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags.”
- And finally a story from surrealist Haruki Murakami takes us to Thailand courtesy of Granta. Murakami is asking existential questions about bitterness and regret with a little of his usual magic. The Granta site is it’s own rabbit hole of delights, you can get three more Murakami stories and a wealth of others. It was nice knowing you!
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