The Atlantic discusses the link between science fiction and colonialism. “The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think.”
Sci-Fi and Colonialism
Kindle Spam is Here
Inevitable: Spam is increasingly cropping up among the self-publishing hordes on the Kindle.
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Best of 2009
The Guardian asks various notable people, from Malcolm Gladwell to actor Dominic West, what their favorite books of the year are.
“Will you sign my house?”
“Is this skyscraper autobiographical?” People say some pretty ridiculous things about writing. To put it in perspective, Mallory Ortberg presents “If We Talked About Architecture Like We Talk About Writing.”
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Death and Dishonor
At Granta’s website, the novelist David McConnell explains his fascination with the “honor killing,” a hate crime targeted at gay men that inspired his latest book.
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Blurbing for Laughs
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Punderstrike
At The Hairpin, Alexa C. Kurzius pays a visit to the Punderdome 3000, a monthly “com-pun-tition” that takes place in (where else?) Brooklyn. Among other highlights, the author constructs an alter ego for herself named Pundercat.
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The Future by Philip K. Dick
“Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together.” An essay in the Boston Review argues the importance of Philip K. Dick‘s literature— where the real and fake intersect and collide — and the world we live in today. From our archive: on the pleasures of Dick’s sometimes awful prose.