In New Scientist, several prominent scientists and literary types “nominate their lost sci-fi classics,” from Richard Dawkins on Dark Universe to William Gibson on Random Acts of Senseless Violence.
Scientists on Science Fiction
Honesty Trumps Good Manners
“Our children, at least in this country, with no tales of war to tell; only music and clothes. Infuriating and a blessing for our parents, who had experienced the abyss staring back at them. I suppose their memories must have hung around their necks like stinking albatrosses, only for their children to turn out themselves to be an abyss gazing back at the next generation. Is it catching? Whose 1950s was I living?” This installment of Jenny Diski’s memoir from the London Review of Books is not to be missed.
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FYI: GRH
The editor of the sumptuous Aussie lit-mag Torpedo - a kind of antipodean McSweeney's - interviews a recent contributor: me (2).
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Writing as Advocacy
“There’s this sense of guilt that my writing career is going well because black people are being killed. I’ve reached a point where I don’t know if I have anything new to say. It’s the same narrative over and over.” Debut novelist Brit Bennett gets profiled for The New York Times about The Mothers, which we included in the list of October book releases we're most excited about.
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Recommended Writers: Caribbean Edition
Ebony has a brief list of “Six Caribbean Writers to Discover This Summer,” and it’s a nice complement to Fortnightly Review’s recent double-feature on Dominican poets Homero Pumarol and Frank Báez. I also recommend checking out Generación Año Cero, an online collection of sixteen short stories from a “movement of [Cuban] writers who began publishing in 2000.”
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Moonshoot
"Much has been made of the seemingly prophetic nature of Verne’s lunar stories: elements such as the distance and time to reach the moon, and even the launch and landing sites for the mission fall very closely to what actually happened during NASA’s Apollo program." On the prophetic and historical power of Jules Verne's science fiction novels, including the works that later inspired the space program.
Photographing Reality
Do author photographs change the way we see them (or the way we read their works)? At Lit Hub, stare into the souls of a few iconic writers and read about how author photos impact us. You could also read our review of Street Seen, which maps out how photography and reality became intertwined.
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