ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Did you ever notice that some novels are extensions of (or based off of) shorter works of fiction? This week at the Kirkust Reviews Blog, I take at look at that very thing. I used this as an opportunity to interview Ted Kosmatka, Catherine Lundoff, Will McInrosh, Linda Nagata and Robert J. Sawyer — all of whom have novels that began life as short fiction.


See some of the challenges they faced over at the Kirkus Reviews Blog in When Short Fiction Grows Into a Novel.

MIND MELD: What is the Literary Appeal of Gods, Goddesses and Myths?

Q: Gods, Goddesses and Myths: From Rick Riordan to Dan Simmons, the popularity of Gods, Goddesses and Mythology, especially but not limited to Classical Greco-Roman and Norse mythology seems as fresh as ever. What is the appeal and power of mythological figures, in and out of their normal time? What do they bring to genre fiction?

Here's what they said:

Is There A New New Wave of Science Fiction, And Do We Need One Anyway?

Just shy of half a century since the young Michael Moorcock took the editorial helm of a long-running magazine called New Worlds and ushered in a new age of avant-garde science fiction, it appears that we might be in the throes of the birth of a new New Wave.
   The original New Wave moved away from shiny futures and bug-eyed monsters and offered more experimental literature, both in technique and subject matter, perhaps best exemplified a couple of years later in 1967 when Harlan Ellison released his Dangerous Visions anthology, bringing new voices, new ideas and a new way of telling stories to take over from the rocket-ships and square-jawed heroes that had gone before. New Wave also brought to the fore many more female writers, such as Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr.
   But does the emergence of a new aesthetic in (largely) contemporary British SF signal a similar movement nearly 50 years on?

   If so, it is perhaps fitting, then, that one of the main proponents of our New New Wave has nods to the past both in its title, which hearkens back to the Golden Age supplanted by New Wave, and by including an interview with Moorcock himself.
   Just like the New Wave never set out to be a movement, neither do those involved in the New New Wave; rather, it is serendipity that they've all come together at roughly the same time to create a bit of a buzz in the SF world. Adventure Rocketship! is a new publication edited by writer and journalist Jonathan Wright, which includes fiction, interviews and criticism. It was, says Wright, loosely modeled on The Idler: "I love the idea of a series with its own evolving aesthetic. Also, while being fascinated by digital projects, I still love the idea of the book as object. In the case of Adventure Rocketship! the idea is on one level really as simple as a leftfield SF anthology or even magazine in book form with each issue themed. The first issue, "Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco," is about music, SF and the counterculture—and the space where they meet."

(nastavak na http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/05/is-there-a-new-new-wave-of-science-fiction-and-do-we-need-one-anyway)

In his keynote speech at the recent Augmented World Expo, sf author Bruce sterling shares his thoughts on augmented reality.



Bruce Sterling - Keynote at AWE 2013

50 Essential Epic Fantasies (Part 1: 8th Century BC - 1982)          Liz Bourke, Justin Landon, Tansy Rayner Roberts and I have challenged one another to write and compare our lists of "Essential" Epic Fantasies. The result is a multi-blogger liststravaganza! (For a previous challenge with SF, see here.)

The rules are as follows:

   
• No more than one book or series from     each author. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien could go in for The     Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings series, but not both.
• No anthologies.
• You can only list books that you have     read.
• Definitions of "essential",     "epic" and "fantasy" are left to personal interpretation.

That third rule limits me to things that are in English, which means this is an extremely Anglo-American list. Sorry about that - as always, please leave feedback and suggested reading in the comments.

I've defined "essential" as "gives or informs a useful perspective on the category". I've also tried to cover as much of a range as possible with the fifty picks. So the "essential" list should be a holistic view of the category. Favouritism is unavoidable, but I've balanced out some of those picks with books I really dislike. Only fair.

Specifically, because I'm a nutball, I'm interested in how the epic fantasy category has progressed, or, in many cases - stayed fairly static. There are some strands of epic fantasy that seem, well, completely unchanged over two thousand years. There are other strands in which the category actively pulls in tropes and themes from other genres. This first part of the list - Homer to the early 1980s - focuses on establishing these strands. The second part of the list (coming Monday) is more about progression (and the lack thereof).

As with all lists, I look forward to the debate. Please share your own "essential" books in the comments, and don't forget to check out what the others have done: Liz, Justin, Tansy.

Enough of that. Here's the first half of my personal list of "essential" epic fantasies:Continue reading "50 Essential Epic Fantasies (Part 1: 8th Century BC - 1982)" »

We asked this week's panelists...
Q: What are some of the most overdone tropes and stereotypes in SF/F? What are some of the most useful? What are some of the most damaging?
Here's what they said...

   
• You keep using  that term; I do not think it means what you think it means:  Coleridge's original formulation of the term is not concerned with the unrealness of what is presented, but with an idea of the truth that the unrealness might contain for the reader to discover. You can read the term in context here. What Coleridge primarily wants the reader to consider is that a fantastical or supernatural moment can contain a potent understanding and illumination of the human condition. I think the key phrase here is not 'willing suspension of disbelief," but "awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom." The concern is not the suspension so much as the willingness to be open to what awaits the reader in the text.
  The term is used today to describe a negative action: to withhold disbelief as if our default setting was to not accept anything "unreal." The focus is on the use of will to suspend disbelief, a very literal application of the term. But Coleridge is after more than that, as indicated by the additional phrase "which constitutes poetic faith." This is part of a larger act of belief. Coleridge is not counseling for the holding back of something, but for creating that effect in the act of accepting what one is reading. In that moment of faith a reader "procures" that effect of disbelief "for these shadows of imagination."  And does it not grudgingly, but openly.
• "Imagination...does not need to be redeemed by a dissociative framework providing for suspension of disbelief": This is a quotation from Richard Walsh, who wrote a fascinating chapter on dreams and the imagination in the book Toward A Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts. Walsh points out that human beings two do things constantly: they narrativize their sensory intake and imagination, and these narratives do not require this dissociation because the act of representation does not need some kind of verification. We believe, if only partially, for a short time, or in a limited fashion.  We do not have to somehow make something truthful –certainly not through some kind of self-deception — for it affect us. Coleridge might approve of this idea given his own distinction between "fancy," a dull, debased imagining, and "imagination" as a vital force that animates the world around us.  The point is, the literal notion of "willing suspension  of disbelief" is unnecessary; we don't need that suspension to engage a fantastic text.
• "[T]he notion of suspension of disbelief cannot coherently be used to explain or account for our reactions to fictional characters and events." Eva Schaper wrote this in 1978 in a critique from a philosophical perspective.  Schaper was interested in dealing with "the paradox of fiction" as something we know to be unreal but that we react to, on some level, as real.  Her argument was that an idea of conjured, faked credulity does not tell us why fiction stimulates the responses that many readers have to it. We cannot presuppose that there is only complete belief and utter disbelief, but that there are gradations. We have to mix belief and disbelief to both apprehend fiction and to process its effects on us.  A simple notion of withholding disbelief is useless because we engage the world with a combination of believing and disbelieving.
• Reading is an act of believing. From the moment we start to process words we have begun a process of belief and understanding. Reading is, in its first micro-seconds, an act of accepting, of making sense of little marks and unpacking meaning, not of disbelief. In order to read, we have to decide affirmatively to take in the information represented by those little marks. Sometimes with do this without thinking, but it is always a positive action, one of recognition. It is not a complete embrace, but a believing-in-progress. Before we can assess what we believe or do not believe we need to at least provisionally interpret and construct meaning from what we read. Even if we quickly dismiss or critique what we read, the first we have to do is accept the words and the information they represent.
• "[F]iction emerges as an experiential category not through a passive and wholesale sense of disbelief but, rather, through active scrutiny": The psycholinguist Richard Gerrig has written extensively on the problem of "willing suspension of disbelief."  He notes that the idea that we have a "toggle" in our heads that lets us turn disbelief on and off is at odds with our understandings of human consciousness and cognitive processing, and instead characterizes reading fiction as the "willing construction of disbelief." Gerrig's case studies have, he asserts, demonstrated that readers must expend effort "to disbelieve the story." We are cognitively inclined to believe what we read and have to find reasons to not believe. He also notes that "Texts transport readers unequally" and readers have a range of techniques, usually based on individual experiences and desires, that they use to create disbelief.  It is not the same process for everyone, and how much we believe –and how quickly we disbelieve– is not based on whether we have flipped out disbelief switch, but on our own proclivities.
• Reading the fantastic requires understanding, not disbelief: As I've noted before, reading is a process of generating and processing understanding. As Adam Roberts, quoting Gwyneth Jones, noted: "'what is needed' with SF 'is not a suspension of disbelief, it is an active process of translation."  We do not disengage our critical faculties when we read fantastika (or really any other sort of fiction); we adjust them to the text. We search for elements to believe in, for details and tropes and trends that we can embrace and integrate into the experience of reading. Sometimes they ring true and other times they seem to be inert illusions. It is an ongoing process that requires us to be active and probing. This is a far cry from an act of suspension, of somehow putting away our discernment to let ourselves be tricked by a text. Reading fantastika is about much more than that.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/07/six-fervently-held-hypotheses-regarding-willing-suspension-of-disbelief/#more-79007

"Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life..." Viktor Shklovsky
"For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us 'images' of the future-whatever such images might mean for a reader who will necessarily predecease their 'materialization'-but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization" – Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, p. 286.


I begin this week with one simple quotation, taken spectacularly out of context, and a very complex one that hits the mark like grapeshot at point-blank range (and with about the same subtlety). I discovered the work of Viktor Shklovsky, one of the premiere Russian Formalist thinkers, only a couple of years ago, but his ideas have cracked open and lit up some corners of the literary experience for me in profound ways. What unites his quotation and the long one from Jameson is that they both deal with the practice of ostranenie, of alienation/defamiliarization/estrangement (depending on your translation and intentions). Estrangement, the effect generated by a literary narrative that creates conceptual distance from the literal and commonly-accepted and thus permits imaginative transport, is the device we use to turn everyday words and stories into art. Ostranenie is the term that Shklovsky (thought he) coined for this process. As he puts it:

Read the rest of this entry

I sad ispade da je Jameson za to zaslužan...   
A brata Jugoslovena ni da pomenu...
Ua...


Све чешће ми дође да пишем ћирилицом... 

https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/critical-literacy-teaching-series-challenging-authors-and-genres/science-fiction-and-speculative-fiction/


Science Fiction and Speculative FictionChallenging Genres
2013 - 226 pages
Paul Thomas (Furman University, Greenville, SC, USA) (Ed.)
ISBN Paperback: 9789462093782 ($ 43.00)
ISBN Hardcover: 9789462093799 ($ 99.00)

Subject: Literacy, Teacher Education, Culture and Education
Number 3 of the series: Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres
Free Preview Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction


Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument.

The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse.

The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education.

Buy this book at Amazon:
Paperback | Hardcover
Buy this book at Barnes & Noble:
Paperback | Hardcover

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Challenging Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction 1
P. L. Thomas
1. A Case for SF and Speculative Fiction: An Introductory
Consideration 15
P. L. Thomas
2. SF and Speculative Novels: Confronting the Science
and the Fiction 35
Michael Svec and Mike Winiski
3. SF Novels and Sociological Experimentation: Examining Real
World Dynamics through Imaginative Displacement 59
Aaron Passell
4. "Peel[ing] apart Layers of Meaning" in SF Short Fiction:
Inviting Students to Extrapolate on the Effects of Change 73
Jennifer Lyn Dorsey
5. Reading Alien Suns: Using SF Film to Teach a Political Literacy
of Possibility 95
John Hoben
6. Singularity, Cyborgs, Drones, Replicants and Avatars:
Coming to Terms with the Digital Self 119
Leila E. Villaverde and Roymieco A. Carter
7. Troubling Notions of Reality inCaprica: Examining "Paradoxical
States" of Being 133
Erin Brownlee Dell
8. "I Try to Remember Who I Am and Who I Am Not":
The Subjugation of Nature and Women in The Hunger Games 145
Sean P. Connors
vTABLE OF CONTENTS
9. "It's a Bird . . . It's a Plane . . . It's . . . a Comic Book in the
Classroom?": Truth: Red, White, and Black as Test Case for Teaching
Superhero Comics 165
Sean P. Connors
10. The Enduring Power of SF, Speculative and Dystopian Fiction:
Final Thoughts 185
P. L. Thomas
Author Biographies 217