Teorija i praksa

[Melkor]

The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism

By Jonathan Lethem

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .
—John Donne

[PTY]

Taman htedoh nešto reći o veštini sa kojom barata referencama, ali na vreme shvatih da sam izmešala stavove Lethema i Lathama... 

[Gaff]

Interesantno ovo...

Neće dugo potrajati pa će da tuže i ako napišeš mišljenje/prikaz/štagod o knjizi/filmu/čemugod, a nisi tražio+dobio pravo da na taj način pomeneš to delo.

[Father Jape]

Često na ovom forumu ne znam gde šta da turim (a i van foruma, har har har), pa ću ovo da stavim ovde:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/18/fifty-literary-life-robert-mccrum

Fifty things I've learned about the literary life, Roberta Mekram.

[ivica]

Odličan članak! Najviše mi je ovo palo za oko: Some of the best contemporary writers are working in American television.

[PTY]

Ms Tomalin, author of the book Charles Dickens: A Life, said major themes in   his work reverberated in 21st century Britain, including the "great gulf   between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of   Parliament, how the country is run by old Etonians". But she said key failings in the education system – combined with the   influence of modern technology – meant many children could not fully   appreciate his books.
"What Dickens wrote about is  amazingly relevant," she said.
"The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short   attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television   programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and   you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think   that's a pity."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9062356/Modern-children-lack-the-attention-to-read-Dickens.html

[PTY]

The highest grossing film of all-time is James Cameron's science fiction epicAvatar. My wife, who is not by any consideration a fan of science fiction, loved the movie. As we left the theater after first seeing Avatar she raved on and on about the characters and special effects and emotional storyline. "Yes," I replied. "It was a very good science fiction film."
That stopped my wife in her tracks. "Science fiction?" she asked. "Avatarwasn't science fiction."
My mind was literally blown. I pointed out that the film involved aliens on an alien world, along with spaceships, futuristic technology, and so on. But my wife was adamant. The film had appealed to her because of the romance between the main characters and the political and environmental undertones of the human/native conflict. "Avatar might technically be science fiction," she finally admitted, "but the film worked despite this fact."

[scallop]

Ima žena pravo - ponekad i priča mora da bude dobra.

[PTY]

Cognitive estrangement was first presented by Darko Suvin (the man who brought SF criticism the novum) as a formalized, narrow conception of what SF does, and thus what makes the genre distinctive. In the decades since he presented this idea (in most detail in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction), it has undergone scrutiny and development, by both Suvin and other writers. and maintains an influential position in the discourse on fantastic literature.  What Suvin wrote in 1973, that cognitive estrangement is "the basis of the literary genre of SF" is true, if more nuanced and critically-examined, today. As Patrick Parrinder noted in his introduction to Learning From Other Worlds, a volume that examines this idea from a number of angles, Suvin's conception has become "paradigmatic."

The use of this idea as a heuristic device has shaped how SF is examined academically, but has also influenced less rarified discourse as well. Suvin's idea is often presented (in its older form) as [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction]a definition of SF, for example:

"[SF is] a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.

"[/url]

[PTY]

DeNardo na Kirkusu:

Science fiction often gets a bad rap for using hard-to-understand scientific terms. Well...OK, guilty as charged. But just because science fiction has an occasional tendency to use complex language doesn't mean that it's impossible to understand—especially when you have the following glossary at the ready the next time you pick up a science-fiction book from the shelf.

[PTY]

DeNardo na Kirkusu, nastavak: Demystifying Sci-Fi Terms, Part 2.

[PTY]

"Science fiction criticism, of course, is still very much in the Formalist stage. It is often obsessed with "good" and "bad" – it is a mode of review rather than of criticism. Its effectiveness, in the majority of cases, is questionable." - Lavie Tidhar

"Since it is in the nature of SF's oxymoronic fusion of the rational and the marvelous to challenge received notions of reality – sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully – critical provocation is part of SF's generic identity." – Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

[PTY]

MIND MELD: The Non-Genre Influences of Genre Authors






 

[PTY]

 
I am perpetually fascinated by the social and cultural stuff that is spawned by our engagement with literature. Some of this stuff – the positions, structures, and practices that constitute the literary field of production – is seen as a natural part of the field, while other elements are seen as distractions or problems within the field. But the more I read about and observe how we discuss and share our thoughts and opinions on fantastic literature, how we use our imaginations and communication skills to enjoy and interpret it, the more I see what is exceptional and troubling about how the fields around that literature work. Sociologists, anthropologists, and other academic and scientific analysts have frequently tried to theorize about and explain those workings, but most of those efforts are dense, discursively challenging (in both use of jargon and structuring of argument), and sometimes outright obtuse. One of my own goals as a writer, critic, and observer of the field is to figure out what is useful about some of those theories and explanations and apply them in ways that can get people thinking more critically and creatively about how we bring literature in our lives and what its effects are on us, and how we in turn affect the production and perception of literature.
This week, I want to sketch out some ideas of how the field works and then apply them (too briefly) to the way in which reviews and awards create focal points of struggle through the negotiation of controversy.

[PTY]

 
The more recent and emotionally charged the history, the more complicated the work is for the writer. History is edited and smoothed out over time. That has yet to happen with current events. For example, ask any police officer how many witnesses to a crime they prefer to have and they'll tell you... one. Why? Studies have shown that human beings perceive events differently in subtle ways. So, if five witnesses step forward, there are five separate versions of what happened. Each and every version is valid. Remember we're talking about personal events, not a distant, far-flung history. If lives have been lost, and generally they have been in this type of event, then the stakes are quite high. In many ways, the approach is connected to writing about Other. The same caution, attention to detail, patience, respect, and concern are required. If you ask me, the first step is in listening to those who have lived the events you're writing about — really listening with an understanding that the witness to the event is the expert, not yourself. You'll never know what it was like to live through what another human being has. You can only guess. So it is that without the ability to listen with an ego-less ear, a writer is doomed to fail.

[Mica Milovanovic]

Da li ste ovo negde stavili?


Interview: William Gibson[size=0.85em]by THE GEEK'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY[/size][size=0.85em][/color]PUBLISHED APRIL 2012 | 2483 WORDS[/size]
William Gibson is the author of the novel Neuromancer, which defined the cyberpunk subgenre. Recent novels include Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. His latest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, collects his best nonfiction pieces from the past twenty years.
This interview first appeared on [/color]The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which currently airs on Wired.com and is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.


***

Your new book is called Distrust That Particular Flavor. What does that title refer to?
It's a phrase from the piece in the collection called "Time Machine Cuba," and the "particular flavor" is futurists in immediate apocalyptic mode, like, "the world is ending right now, so pay attention to me" . . . it comes after I quote H.G. Wells hitting that particular note in a very particularly shrill way. It's akin to the "after us, the deluge" rant, which is something I watch for in other science fiction writers, because it's usually a bad sign.
Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what's going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better.
It's an ancient, somewhat universal human attitude, and often they give it full voice. But it's been being given voice for thousands and thousands of years. You can go back and see the ancient Greeks doing it. You know, "All that is good is gone. These young people are incapable of making art, or blue jeans, or whatever." It's just an ancient thing, and it's so ancient that I'm inclined to think it's never actually true. And I've always been deeply, deeply distrustful of anybody's "golden age"—that one in which we no longer live.
Your new book opens with a photo of a young William Gibson. When was that photo taken, and why did you decide to include it in the book?
I'm not sure when it was taken. It would have been very late '80s or very early '90s, and I liked it because it was emblematic of the fact that beautiful women actually can marry guys who look like Dr. Seuss characters.
Many of the pieces in the book were written for Wired magazine. How did you first get started writing for Wired, and how did you end up writing so many articles for them?
I had met Kevin Kelly via the Global Business Network, and then Kevin and whoever else started Wired, back when it was a crazy, indie San Francisco thing. So, although I don't actually remember, I'm sure Kevin called me up and started suggesting gigs, and it was easier and more fun to do that sort of thing with Wired than anybody else, because they weren't the product of a major publishing company. They didn't have a huge, ancient culture of magazine publishing in position to make things difficult, so they would suggest genuinely crazy and interesting things to highly unlikely people. I think Bruce Sterling may have gotten in there first and that could have been a factor, too.
Obviously the media world has changed a lot since you first started writing. If you were just getting started today, do you think you'd get into podcasting, YouTube, or webcomics, anything like that?
I think about that when young people ask me what they should do to get started, because when they ask me that, I realize that I don't know, because I'm not really familiar with the news. When I began, I knew more or less what was possible with what was available then. Today I don't really know. It's one of the reasons that writers who've been established for a while actually can't give younger writers very much advice, particularly today, because . . . you know, that stuff didn't really change much for a long time. I saw advice to young writers when I was in my early teens, in the early '60s, that was perfectly valid and useful advice when I began writing in the late '70s, because things hadn't changed that much, but now things have indeed changed quite a lot.
Speaking of your early work, did you basically achieve success right away when you were first sending out your short stories, or did you accumulate a bunch of rejections, like most writers do, before you made your first couple sales?
The first story I wrote was written in a class on science fiction criticism, and then people twisted my arm and forced me to submit it somewhere, and I submitted it to the most obscure market I could find, and it was immediately purchased. That story was "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" in a little magazine called Unearth, which only published people's first stories. So the next time I wrote a short story, I sent it to that market, and they rejected it. It was some early version of whatever became "Johnny Mnemonic," and it discouraged me. I was easily discouraged. The rejection discouraged me, and I didn't go back to writing science fiction stories for a while.
Then a friend of mine, who was much more aggressive and ambitious than I was, had gone to New York and was hustling publication in Omni, and told me they were paying good money and I was a fool not to get in there. So he somehow talked me into submitting to them, and I think the idea of submitting to a bigger market created some pressure that caused me to push a little harder in the rewrite than I would have done submitting to a less big-deal market. Then they bought it. But I went from, you know, a market that paid like $27 for a story to a market that paid like $2,700 for a story of the same length.
So I did everything I could to stay in that market. That was [/color]Omni. You know, if you wrote for any of the digest-sized magazines, they'd give you—if you were lucky—a couple hundred bucks. They really didn't pay. But with Omni you got like $2,700. And that was actually enough money to make a difference. I bought my wife a television set, and I bought myself a plane ticket to New York so I could go and meet the people who'd sent me that check, which actually proved to be a very good investment. After that, I don't think my science fiction was ever rejected. Omni paid so much more than the other science fiction markets that I never wanted to go anywhere else, and as soon as I got into the novel market, I pretty much quit writing short fiction.
I listened to your Intelligence Squared interview with Cory Doctorow. From what he said, it sounds like a lot of people in Singapore sort of have a complex about you referring to their country as "Disneyland with the death penalty." Is that the most worked up that people have gotten over something you've written, or are there other examples?
No, that's the only thing I've ever written that caused a national government to make a formal complaint to the publisher [laughs] . . . and then to ban the magazine for a while.
The documentary No Maps for These Territories features conversations with you as you sit in the back of this moving car with weird psychedelic effects out the windows. I was just wondering, whose idea was it to do the film like that, and what did you think of the result?
That was Mark Neale's idea. Mark Neale was the filmmaker there. Mark Neale and I are friends. Otherwise I wouldn't have done it, because it involved being gaffer-taped to the back of the car. And since the psychedelic shit out the window was put in later, I didn't even get to enjoy that. That said, I've only seen it once. I saw it in a theater. I felt I needed to see it all, and to sign off on it. But since I seriously can't stand the sound of my own recorded voice, it's not something I'll be likely to sit through again.
Why were you gaffer-taped to the car?
Well, once I got into the back seat, they had to tape a lot of stuff together. The car was rigged with eight or 10 pencil cameras, and wires all over the place. It was extremely difficult to get me in and out of the vehicle once we got into recording mode. So it was a little awkward that way. It was as though I was taped into the back of the car.
One of the pieces in the book talks about your hobby of collecting antique watches on eBay. Could you tell us about that?
The watch thing was about . . . I eventually figured out it was really about pursuing a totally unnecessary and gratuitous body of really, really esoteric knowledge. It wasn't about accumulating a bunch of objects. It was about getting into something utterly, witheringly obscure, but getting into it at the level of, like, an extreme sport. I met some extraordinarily weird people. I met guys who could say, "Well, I've got this really rare watch, and it's missing this little piece. Where might I find one?" Then the guy would kind of stare into space for a while, and then he'd say this address in Cairo, and he'd say, "It's in the back room. The guy's name is Alif, and he won't sell, but he would trade it to you if you had this or this." And it wasn't bullshit. It was kind of like a magical universe. It was very interesting. But once I'd gotten that far . . . I got to a certain point, and there was just nowhere else to go with it. The journey was complete. Maybe one day I'll use that stuff in fiction or something.
You wrote a script for Alien 3 that was never filmed. What did you think of the direction the series took, and are you planning to see Prometheus when it comes out?
Oh, gee, I might. You know, I've never actually seen [/color]Alien 3 [laughs]. I've seen the first two. But I'm always curious what Ridley Scott does. I'm more interested in Ridley than I am in the Alien franchise.
So when I first started going to science fiction conventions, I heard this funny story involving you, and I've never been sure whether it was true or if it happened the way I heard it, and I was just wondering if you knew what I was talking about. It was this story where you go to a hotel to check in, and you say, "Hi, I'm Mr. Gibson," and everyone acts all shocked at the hotel.
It was the Beverly Hills Hotel, and, I don't know, somebody had checked me in. It was something film-related. It was when I had started doing some contract screenplay work after that Alien 3 script. So I got there, and they were like, you know, I couldn't figure out what was going on. The desk people just looked gobsmacked and really unhappy. So the bellman takes me up to this very fancy suite, and in the suite there's a table lavishly arrayed with very expensive wines and liquors and floral displays, and a big thing that says: "The Beverly Hills Hotel welcomes Mel Gibson."
And so I looked at the bellman, and I said, you know, "I'm not him, you can take this stuff away." And he said, "No, no, you get to keep it." And I said, "What am I supposed to do with it?" And he said, "Call some friends, have a party."
Have you written any other recent articles or blog posts or anything that people should check out?
No, all I do is tweet. So they can go to @GreatDismal on Twitter, and there I will be.
You had a recent short story appear in an anthology called Darwin's Bastards . . .
Yeah, that's true, that's true. And you know, I wish that somebody would reprint that somewhere where it would be seen, because I quite liked it, and I hadn't done a short story for ages, you know, for 20 years or something. That was the first one, and it's quite unlike any short stories I'd done previously. It's a Canadian anthology—it's actually a very good anthology, there's a lot of really interesting fiction in that thing—but it just doesn't seem to have had much legs.
What was the story about?
It's called "Dougal Discarnate." It's about a guy who takes acid in Vancouver hippiedom in the late '60s or the early '70s, and has a really tremendous rush from doing it and leaves his body, and then he can't get back into his body. And his body is taken to the hospital and it eventually recovers and becomes a stockbroker or a real estate agent or something.
And he's just left this disincorporated, bodiless spirit haunting this particular neighborhood in Vancouver, which for mysterious reasons he discovers he can't leave—there's a sort of invisible barrier. I myself am a character in the story, and I discover this disincorporated guy and become friends with him, and take him to the movies and stuff. He becomes my film-going buddy. But the rest of the story is about how he gets rescued from this seemingly hopeless state, and actually winds up married—sort of—and very, very happy, living in Okinawa. That's all a spoiler, but you can use it anyway. Maybe it'll encourage somebody to buy Darwin's Bastards.

[PTY]

DeNardo:
Today at Kirkus Review Blog, I've got the beginning of a 3-part article on Social Science Fiction.
Check out Science Fiction Gets Social (Part 1)...

One of the characteristics of great literature is that it says something meaningful about life. Science fiction does that, too, except that the perspective is usually seen from an outsider's viewpoint and is often focused on society in general. Being fond of sub-categorizing as we are, science fiction fans call such fiction "social science fiction", and it's concerned less with the tropes usually associated with sf (like spaceships and technology) and more concerned with human activities and how people interact in groups. Or, to tie it back to the "science" label, it's concerned with "soft" sciences like sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, theology, linguistics, cultural studies and more.
Let's take a closer look at social science fiction.

[PTY]

Recently Neal Stephenson wrote an article for the World Policy Journal titled "Innovation Starvation". In the article he discussed the serious lack of innovation in science today. Later in the article, he discusses a presentation that he made at the Future Tense conference where he said that good science fiction supplied "a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place."  One scientist that he talked to complained that SF writers are slacking off, saying that SF writers need "to start supplying big visions that make sense." With Planetary Resources announcing their plan to mine the asteroids, it seems that reality may be encroaching on science fiction's "big idea" territory.

We asked this week's panelists:
Q: Are SF writers "slacking off" or is science fiction still the genre of "big ideas"? If so, what authors are supplying these ideas for the next generation of scientists and engineers?  http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/05/mind-meld-is-sf-still-the-big-idea-genre/#more-55730

[PTY]

This week in the SF History series on the Kirkus Reviews blog, I look at the connection between American author Edgar Allan Poe and French author Jules Verne, and a common story that they both worked on, decades apart, which helped to set the tone for the science fiction genre moving forward.

This was an interesting point in science fiction history, because it's an early point where there was a direct influence from one author to another, not just in one work, but stylistically as well.

Click on over and read The Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne over at the Kirkus Reviews blog!

[PTY]

Writing About Race in Science Fiction and FantasyA Roundtable Interview with David Anthony Durham, Aliette de Bodard, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Ken Liu
(Continued from Part 1)
Q: There is a greater deal of "non-western" science fiction and fantasy being published-successfully-right now. As a result, a sense of excitement about reading and writing works that celebrate a wider range of skin tones and cultural influences appears to permeate the current discourse. Do you think we're seeing a permanent shift in the sff literary culture, or do you think the possibility exists for it to once again restrict itself to certain perspectives? http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/06/guest-post-writing-about-race-in-science-fiction-and-fantasy-part-2-of-a-roundtable-interview/#more-55955

[PTY]

In recent years, the ascension of several former Third World countries to a better economical and geopolitical standing (the best example of which are the like the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has been slowly but steadily bringing a change of paradigms in the way science fiction sees the world. Could it be that novels like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl, Ian McDonald's Brasyl and The Dervish House, to name just a few, are some of the harbingers of this change? Or, as their authors are Western in origin and haven't lived in the countries they portrayed, would they still be focusing on the so-called exotic aspect of foreign countries and therefore failing to see the core of these cultures?

We asked this week's panelists:
Q: How do you Write Science Fiction on a Post-Colonial World? Do you think belonging to a Non-Western culture is essential to write a really good, convincing story about it? Is being an outsider to the culture you want to write about, an enriching or impoverishing experience (or doesn't it matter in the end)?

[Mica Milovanovic]

Pretposlenji Newyorker ima par priča i dosta članaka o SF-u.


Evo sadržaja:


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2012/06/04/toc_20120528


Ima ih i free:

Colson Whitehead piše o fascinaciji B-filmovima i meni dragoj The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film


http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_whitehead

[PTY]

 

There are lots of ways for characters to travel in science fiction stories: spaceship, wormhole, and teleportation to name a few. All of these are useful for getting characters to move across long distances in a hurry. But from the days of early science fiction (before mankind mastered the power of flight) to the steampunk books found on shelves today, a particular method has persisted as being one of the most beloved modes of transport: the airship.

Look at Science Fiction and Fantasy's Love Affair With Airships.

[PTY]

Late last year, after John Ottinger wrote a passionate review of John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion, he was asked by Tor Books publicist Cassandra Ammerman on twitter about why, in his opinion, Space Opera, hadn't gone more mainstream, like steampunk? (her words.) The question made sense: since Steampunk was The Next Big Thing a few years ago and apparently still hasn't begun to lose its (steam) power, should science fiction writers and readers worry about its predominance as a subgenre in detriment of Space Opera, even with many new novels fresh in the market?

So, we asked this week's panelists...
Q: With the growing success of Steampunk in recent years, is Space Opera losing its appeal as a subgenre? Here's what they said...

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/06/mind-meld-has-space-opera-lost-its-luster/#more-57523

[PTY]

 
MIND MELD: Celebrate Revolution and Independence in Genre Books

From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to The Quiet War, political revolutions are a common theme and staple in genre fiction. What are your favorite stories and novels exploring the themes of revolution and Independence? How do those works explore that theme?

Here's what they said...

[divča]

Pravda za KSR-a, ni Icehenge ni Marsovi...

[PTY]

ni ja nisam citala Icehenge... 


nego: Diving Into Pandemonium: Some Turbulent Postulations About Reading and the Fantastic

"In metaphorical terms, one could say that the processes essential to the reading mind are not mechanical or computational, but more oceanic, that is, dynamic, fluvial and fluctuating." Michael Burke. Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind


Reading is on my mind at all times right now, not just because I (like everyone reading this) does it many times per day, but because I've been immersing myself in different scholarly disciplines and genres that try to theorize and analyze the practice. When I first started reading about reading, I had no idea that there was such a dense history of its study or that there would be so many theories about the practice that no one book could contain them all. Someone has been trying to grasp how the process works, and how best to teach and utilize it, for almost 2,500 years. From the earliest forms of Mental Discipline Theory to the latest revelations via fMRI and other scientific scanning processes, humans in literate societies have been attempting to understand just what it is we're doing and why we do it that way. This history is fascinating, but its vastness can be overwhelming without some thought about what you want to learn from it.

I am now sifting through this sea of ideas to find theories that might provide insight into how we specifically read fantastic literature and how this feeds our imagination. The focus is on how ideas of "the reader," genre, and social position within the field of literary production might be better understood using these conceptual tools, drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, literary studies, and wherever else a useful theory might be hiding. The eventual goal is to produce a book on the topic, currently entitled Excursions into Terra Ficta: Reading and Imagining Fantastika. What I want to do this week is discuss a few things that I have discovered as I review this vast body of ideas and think on "paper" about what this means for the reading of fantastic literature.

Each branch of knowledge has its own allure when discussing reading. Cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology all endeavor to produce the most empirical analyses of what the brain actually does when we read. They try to discern and elaborate the way that our brain works when we read. Some of the ideas produced by these approaches are powerful, such as the theory of a Visual Word Form Area, a sort-of clearinghouse for words that sorts them and sends them along the proper pathways to be compiled and comprehended. Stanislas Dehane's Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read goes into great detail about the various aspects of brain functions and the creation of understanding.  But the most interesting thing I have learned from this book, and other discussions of cognition, is that even as we learn more about what actually happens in the brain when we read, we almost inevitably have to metaphorize the process to grasp it.




Dehane himself gives us an example that might please lovers of the fantastika: Oliver Selfridge's idea that "our lexicon works like a huge assembly of 'daemons' or a 'pandemonium'" (p. 42). To better see what the nervous system is doing, Selfridge concocted an elaborate metaphor for the contests of meaning that take place in our minds as we read. It is not an orderly process; it is cacophonous, ongoing, and anarchic. While neuroscientists have determined some general principles of how reading occurs in the brain, they have also realized that the process is unique of each individual. While we are all doing a similar thing, we each do it in our way. Each theorist also has their own way of conceptualizing reading, and almost all of theories that I have encountered so far rely on some sort of metaphor to codify their ideas of what reading is.

Dehane himself uses the metaphor of a "cathedral" to characterize the prefrontal cortex, which is where he feels writing and reading may have developed. He has to use that metaphor, and others, to permit the reader to make sense of his idea of the intersection between human development and the creation of higher functions such as reading. As I finished reading his book, I thought back to other books and articles I have read, and realized that many of them also rely, sometimes quite frequently, on metaphors to communicate their understanding of reading's dynamics and functions.  Not only is there a long, sometimes strange history of trying to figure out how reading works, there is also a history of coming up with apt, powerful metaphors for describing how reading works to readers. Even with the latest scientific research techniques and a millenia-deep tradition of studying reading, we still to this day have to create fantasies of the reading process to make it comprehensible. In order for us to apprehend the practice, we have to create fanciful readings of the process to make our insights into it lucid and arguable.

I see this in other varieties of reading theory too. Psychological theories often abstract the reading process from the basic practice of symbolic identification and translation and merge it with a particular psychological approach, such as conditioning theory or Freudian psychoanalysis. Social science theories perform a similar reinterpretation, bringing reading into a particular theoretical framework, instead of, say, observing how the practice of reading might influence, if not create, the underpinnings of their frameworks. Reading is usually brought into relation with an existing theory not just to illuminate the process of reading, but to add to the veracity of that theory. Rarely does reading reflect back on those theories and their metaphorical foundations.

This is significant because I believe that when critics and scholars talk about reading and fantastic literature we undertake a similar maneuver. We try to understand reading through our experience with the fantastic, and try to appropriate from other theories of reading approaches and metaphors that validate our experience and what we believe the values of fantastika to be. This is not automatically problematic, but it does plant a seed of doubt in our understandings of how fantastic literature is read, assimilated, and used in our imaginations. In our efforts to assess and speculate upon the distinctive characteristics and value of reading fantastic literature, we create understandings of reading that are subsumed by our existing assumptions about what the fantastic "itself" is. Rather than asking "what does the process of reading tell us about how our imaginations create and interpret the fantastic?' we assert that to engage fantastic literature is a unique sort of reading. As I continue to explore different ways of theorizing reading, I wonder if we need to ask new questions for an adjusted perspective.

Of course "reading" is not a singular object or simple process. To merely say that we need to proceed from reading "itself" is also a poor way to examine what we're doing when we read. Reading is a cognitive process that we can watch light up an fMRI monitor, but those mechanics, which we still barely understand, are only one part of what reading actually is. There are individual and collective psychological elements, there are aspects of feeling and motivation, and there are cultural conceits and social effects too. As Bloom and Green put it a few decades ago, "[a]s a social process, reading is used to establish, structure, and maintain social relationships between and among people. As a linguistic process, reading is used to communicate intentions and meanings, not only between an author and a reader, but also between people involved in a reading event." Reading is not just a pandemonium in the mind; it is a pandemonium that emerges from many different angles of human action. We cannot grasp it as one thing, because it is always implicated in multiple layers of thought and practice. Thus, we have to not just create metaphors that make it easier to understand, we have to create fantasies about it that link to what we already know. The trick now is to look more carefully at those fantasies and see how they unfold when we perform particular sorts of reading activity and try to pay attention to the reading without letting our preconceptions or agendas overtake us.

By John H. Stevens | Thursday, July 5th, 2012       

[PTY]

Demystifying Sci-Fi Terms, with 10 Recommended Books (Part 3)                by John DeNardo on July 18, 2012 | Posted in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Science fiction often gets a bad rap for using hard-to-understand terms. Well...OK, guilty as charged. But just because science fiction has an occasional tendency to use complex language doesn't mean that it's impossible to understand—especially when you have the following glossary at the ready the next time you pick up a science-fiction book from the shelf.

In Part 1 and Part 2, we looked at scientific terms. Here, we look at words and phrases that are less scientific, but whose meanings are illuminated with a brief explanation.

Cozy Catastrophe




What's so cozy about the end of the world? A so-called cozy catastrophe is a disaster or postapocalyptic story where the focus is not on the end of civilization, but rather on the characters who, no longer constrained by society's rules, may take advantage of it. It's "cozy" because the characters are usually not in any real danger from the destruction suffered by others.

Continue reading

[PTY]

MIND MELD: Monarchies in Fantasy


Very often, in secondary world fantasy novels, the default political setup is to have a Monarch of some sort, often one that acts in a seemingly autocratic manner. Many times, this Monarch rules by some sort of divine right or providence.


Q: Why are kingdoms with monarchs the default political setup in many secondary fantasy world novels? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such political structures? What are some exceptions to this?

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/07/mind-meld-monarchies-in-fantasy/#more-58731

[PTY]

(...) Writers formulate the words and readers interpret them but both they, and anyone involved in the process of creating or passing on a story, not only view the works through a culturally-inflected prism but enact their own anthropological analysis upon them. As I noted last week, culture is not a finely-tuned system, but is an unevenly-distributed, contingent vision of life and meaning that we have to invigorate and refashion as we go. To do that, we have to learn and apply ideas of how culture works. Like anthropologists, we are observers, we are creators of culture, all of us conjurers of worlds.


Culture and imagination are often sequestered from each other, except for instances where the "cultural imagination" is referred to. As we talked about cultural symbols at the panel I realized that this is a problem because "the imagination" is both a cultural conceit and an array of cognitive practices heavily conditioned by our ideas and assumptions about culture. There is no one spot in the brain that we can point to and call "the imagination;" it is itself a cultural interpretation of mental activities. The imagination is always cultural. At the same time, culture "itself" is a production of imagination; we carry a bundle of notions, precepts, and expectations around in our heads "that allow us to transcend. . . the immediacy of the present instant" as Crapanzano (via Jean Starobinski) puts it. Culture and imagination are made in relation to each other and exist in a rough synergy, shaping and challenging each other and the world around us.


I point this out because so much of the discourse on worldbuilding is not about how humans construct their worlds, but focuses instead on the materials and effects we use to express and enact culture. Our separation of culture and imagination and their bounded reification, treating them as somehow separate, limits our conception and utilization of them. We impose parameters on each rather than emphasizing how they inform each other. Conversely, we also imbue them with exaggerated qualities: the limited, structured, inescapable culture versus the limitless, dream-strewn imagination.



This separation creates a number of assumptions and heavily influences the worlds that many fantastic stories create. You can see it in towering piles of novels that seem to recycle the same ideas time and time again, occasionally subverting or riffing on a trope. You can see it in worlds that are defined by their statistics and ornaments, in the hunger of some readers who care more about the decorations of culture than the practicing of it. You can see it in the differing conceptions of Fantasy and SF, where Fantasy is so often culture-bound and SF is ideally innovative and mind-stretching. I'm thinking in particular about the recent Mind Meld discussionabout monarchies in fantasy fiction. Several participants noted that monarchies proliferate in epic/high fantasy because they are culturally comfortable for many readers and are  relatively simple and useful for creating scenarios of conflict. These ideas essentially affirm the limits of imagination we have imposed (at least on secondary world fantasy) by deploying cultural assumptions about what political structures make for quick and obvious backgrounds for a story.


http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/07/culture-imagination-and-fantastika-more-thoughts-on-conjuration/#more-58812

[PTY]

In a 2011 blog post, Farah Mendlesohn wrote, "'Worldbuilding' as we understand it, has its roots in traditions that described the world in monolithic ways: folklore studies, anthropology, archeology, all began with an interest in describing discrete groups of people and for that they needed people to be discrete." This panel will discuss the historical and present-day merging and mingling of real-world cultures, and advise writers on building less monolithic and more plausible fictional ones."

We had a lively conversation that ranged from historical fiction to John Norman's Gor series. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and I want to thank my fellow panelists for making the discussion informative and fun. The panelists are (from left to right):

   
• James L. Cambias
• John H. Stevens (me)
• Christopher M. Cevasco
• Francesca Forrest
• Harold Torger Vedeler

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&list=PLB71F5284E77878B0&v=ENSRauHNHGY#t=0s

[Gaff]

Ruth Franklin o rođenju "Čudovišta":

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/101435/mary-shelley-frankenstein-godwin-bodleian-oxford

[PTY]

The recent United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio 2012 or Rio+20, where the heads of state of 192 governments discussed sustainable development and declared their commitment to the promotion of a sustainable future, has – even if for a short while – galvanized the media attention. Science fiction, however, has never turned its back on ecology, being a constant theme, growing strong particularly in the past few years, with authors ranging from the master ecothinker Kim Stanley Robinson to younger and prolific Paolo Bacigalupi, all focusing in strategies to survival of humankind under a grim scenario of climate change.


So, we asked this week's panelists:

Q: With all the debates on global warming, the constant fear that we may be running scarce of basic resources such as potable water in the near future, what is science fiction's role in this panorama? What are your favorite SFnal scenarios for problem-solving regarding the maintenance and sustainability of ecosystems, if any? Is there any scenario science fiction could be exploring better with relation to ecology? 

Here's what they said...

[Gaff]

John DeNardo o tome da li živimo u "naučnofantastičnom" svetu. Jedino što je tekst kratak. 

The second thing to note is that much of mainstream literature is not necessarily a true reflection of our high-tech times. If our present is inundated with such awesome technology, then why is mainstream literature so devoid of it? Shouldn't mainstream novels be filled with people who are addicted to Facebook; people who troll websites and forums to leave hateful, anonymous comments; and a cache of information that's no further away than the smartphone in your pocket? There's a disconnect here that quickly threatens to paint mainstream literature as outdated. At the very least, it has some catching up to do.

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/blog/science-fiction-and-fantasy/have-we-passed-point-where-science-fiction-fiction/#continue_reading_post

[Gaff]

I John H. Stevens dodaje svoje mišljenje o temi:

MIND MELD: Monarchies in Fantasy

Simplicity, Drama, and Domination: On Monarchy in Secondary-World Fiction

The basic dramas of monarchy are familiar to many readers, and are not merely comfortable, but diverting. The worlds these monarchies assume can be entered into without great disruption and the fantasy thus has a well-worn familiarity to it, even if the names and clothes and geography are new. Expectations can be fulfilled or disrupted to create satisfaction or surprise.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/07/simplicity-drama-and-domination-on-monarchy-in-secondary-world-fiction/#more-59005

[Gaff]

Google Books Ngram: vampire, zombie, werewolf

Google Books Ngram: alien, spaceship, robot, AI

Google Books Ngram: dragon, elf, magic, wizard

[PTY]

nesto malo o fanfiction stranputicama...  :


The Outsiders novelist S.E. Hinton took to Twitter to talk about fan fiction earlier this week. FanFiction.net counts more than 6,300 fan fiction stories about her beloved novel.
Hinton noted "I normally do not have a problem with fanfics," but responded to one fan fiction author who imagined an unexpected pregnancy (contains NSFW language) in her classic series. Hinton had an unequivocal response: "bangs head on desk ... no no no." You can read all her thoughts in the Storify post embedded below.

Earlier this year, Hinton told School Library Journal: "I have several things going on. I'm eternally wasting my time on  Twitter. I'm also in the middle of a very superficial comedic  supernatural thriller thing that I would like to finish.  Also, I'm  going to be working on webisodes in conjunction with the University  of  Tulsa film students based on my short stories."

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/s-e-hinton-responds-to-outsiders-fan-fiction_b55257

[Gaff]

Is Kickstarter A Viable Tool For Writers? - s LitReactora.


http://litreactor.com/columns/on-the-pros-and-cons-of-kickstarter-as-a-tool-for-writers

[Gaff]

MIND MELD: Non-Fiction Books About Science Fiction That Should Be In Every Fan's Library

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/07/mind-meld-non-fiction-books-about-science-fiction-that-should-be-in-every-fans-library/

[Gaff]

John H. Stevens dodaje još interesantnih misli svom prethodnom razmatranju monarhističkih uređenja u fantastici.

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/08/the-fantasy-of-kingship/

[Gaff]

Andre Seewood: Oslobađanje naučne fantastike od (crno-)rasističkog ropstva

For example, if you as a filmmaker omit African-Americans from the science-fiction story altogether then the critical concept of "structured absence" allows your critics to use any other non-white race, animal, or object within your film as a symbol of minority otherness and then "interpret" a racial commentary where you had not intended such a commentary to exist.  One needs only to read Ed Guerrero's devastating analysis of Joe Dante's GREMLINS (1984) and GREMLINS 2: The New Batch (1990) in his book Framing Blackness.(4) 
In regards to the absence of African-Americans in the GREMLINS films, Guerrero interprets the Gremlins themselves as symbols of minority otherness and asserts that," the film's socially repressed fears have to do with non-white minorities gaining political power, as Gremlins 2, satires the political subtleties of an increasing influential "minority discourse" in contemporary American life more than it plays upon latent anxieties over racial otherness." (pg.65)  Although it could alternately be argued that many White American filmmakers were omitting African-American characters from their science-fiction films in a naïve and erroneous attempt to avoid racial issues and keep those issues from stealing focus from their central themes.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/freeing-black-science-fiction-from-the-chains-of-race#

[Gaff]

Razvoj indijske naučne fantastike, ukratko:

http://nova-sf.de/internova/?p=382

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ovaj tekst imate u Ubiqu 9

[Gaff]

Kako stvoriti dobru sf tv-seriju?

Chris McQuillan: Top 7 tips for creating new sci-fi in 2012.

The amount of patience we hold for new television is dropping. Whereas decades ago, one bad episode of a TV series didn't do too much harm, nowadays it can lose you a million viewers the next week – and you may never get them back. We are cynical, as shows like Firefly have shown that even the best series can be cancelled within the next month, leaving you disappointed and with no satisfactory resolution to the storyline. Networks view shows as a game of numbers: bad ratings = cancellation. But what they perhaps do not realise is that flippant, trigger-happy cancellations damage network reputation; and, compounded, will make viewers ever-more hesitant and cautious when it comes to embracing a new show.

http://www.scifiheaven.net/index.php/2012/08/04/top-7-tips-for-creating-new-sci-fi-in-2012/

[Gaff]

Na SF Signalu:

Mike Resnick has sent along the table of contents for Resnick On The Loose, his upcoming non-fiction collection of 77 articles, introductions and editorials...

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/08/toc-resnick-on-the-loose-by-mike-resnick/

[PTY]

In writing, point of View matters. So we asked a large handful of authors these questions:

Q: As you see it. What are the strengths and weaknesses, for character, worldbuilding and setting in using 1st or 3rd person (or even 2nd?) Omniscient or limited? And how about the time frame of the tense, past or present or even future?

What kinds of Point of view do you prefer to write in? What types of POV do you like to read?

[Gaff]

Kako i zašto ubiti svoje likove - Adrian Tchaikovsky za Tor Books Blog.

http://torbooks.co.uk/2012/08/07/or-from-a-great-height-killing-off-characters-in-epic-fantasy/

[Gaff]

Locusmagov okrugli sto o (prevedenim) delima fantastike van engleskog govornog područja koji su uticali na paneliste: Karen Burnham, Karen Lord, Karen Joy Fowler, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Rich Horton, Charles Tan, Theodora Goss, Fabio Fernandes i Cat Rambo.

http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2012/08/roundtable-on-jorge-luis-borges-and-others/all/1/

[Meho Krljic]

Interesantan tred na slešdotu: koja je najdepresivnija SF knjiga/ priča/ novela koju ste ikada pročitali? Neke sjajne preporuke mogu da se nađu. 

[Gaff]

In writing, point of View matters. So we asked a large handful of authors these questions:

Q: As you see it. What are the strengths and weaknesses, for character, worldbuilding and setting in using 1st or 3rd person (or even 2nd?) Omniscient or limited? And how about the time frame of the tense, past or present or even future?

What kinds of Point of view do you prefer to write in? What types of POV do you like to read?

A evo i nastavka:

What kinds of Point of view do you prefer to write in? What types of POV do you like to read?