Worth A Thousand Words

I laughed at this because it's true.

My friend Osie sent me this review that elaborates on the divide between sci-fi as a genre and mainstream fiction. This article isn't saying it, but when I hear 'sci-fi' (or insert genre here) should be more accessible, I hear those guys like Michael Medved who appointed themselves guardians of Middle America, and want Hollywood to make movies everyone wants to see. Not smart, challenging artistic films like the ones nominated for the Oscars this year, but stupider, less diverse films that don't threaten anyone's politics or sexuality. Some sci-fi does read like an instruction manual. It doesn't interest me personally. It never really did. I love spaceships and robots and all of that, but stopping to explain it can be fatal. It doesn't really matter how it works, unless all you care about is how it works, and certainly some people do. You don't stop in the middle of a story to explain how a Toyota works, for instance.

Osie also sent me a preview of his upcoming zine, Murmur, which looks amazing. Hopefully he'll let me show a little of it on here. I love that there is art down here in Waterloo, I love that I'm able to be a part of it. That excites me, and it frustrates me too, because this place has been so dry for so long, some people don't know how to drink. Progress is progress when you move forward. Doesn't matter how slow. Progress isn't saying you're making progress and then saying that over and over again. It's art. Show, don't tell.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more