Google, Godwin, & the Philosopher’s Stone
Godwin’s conviction of the possibility of immortality, which only a few years ago might have seemed quixotic and a bit embarrassing, has come back into fashion.
The American Soldier in Arab Novels
Iraqi writers, by and large, have created worlds where the soldier’s perspective, either Iraqi or foreign, isn’t primary.
The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes
Maybe there is another model for fantasy, one that does not simply eschew the Christian framework established by Tolkien and Lewis that so defines the genre, but complicates it, turning the focus away from destiny and back to moral choice, to human agency.
On Haiti and the Resistive Imagination
The zombie of the Revolution has now infiltrated popular culture, history, and creative expressions.
Teenaged harbingers of change in dystopias both imagined and real.
The real Florida is wedged between county roads leading to forgotten beaches, or deep in the neighborhoods where tourists won’t go. If you know where to look, you can find its edges.
What we talk about when we talk about the Space Age.
George Lippard: Gothic Architect
Lippard’s journalism was lurid and fictionalized, his historical writing Gothic, his Gothicism sentimental, based on real events, and often intended — like his nonfiction — to instruct and improve society.
As evinced by the last four decades of DIY music, we already use the technology of tech-capitalists toward proto-revolutionary ends, even small-scale, revolutionary societies.
After disaster, there is only disaster. It is a familiar and unrecognizable present. And whether we recognize it or not, whether we read it or write it or not, we are living the climate crisis.