A Far Out Fantastic Site

We are in a time of plague, but even so it’s not the end of the world. (At least not yet.) So as with every first Wednesday of the month (although here on the west coast it's already early Thursday, so my apologies for posting late) it is time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions. The IWSG question for this month: The IWSG’s focus is on our writers. Each month, from all over the globe, we are a united group sharing our insecurities, our troubles, and our pain. So, in this time when our world is in crisis with the covid-19 pandemic, our optional question this month is: how are things in your world? In answer to this, other than an occasional (an average of once a week, maybe), quick trip in town for the absolute essentials (e.g. groceries) and a very short daily walk outside for fresh air, I have only left ...

Credit: Pixabay.com Here is another post of Lightning News Flashes! Lightning News Flashes are bits of news in the science fiction and fantasy scene. The news for this post: author Ian McEwan’s response to fans lashing out at his so-called denial of science fiction; a new BBC series of articles about sci fi books that correctly predicted today’s events; an artifact from a classic Universal film based on a classic gothic novel; the Locus Awards. Ian McEwan Says He Was Not Putting Down Sci Fi  Last week , I said it was reported that Ian McEwan was criticised by science fiction fans for denying his newest book, Machines Like Me , being sci fi and implying that the genre was an insignificant form of fiction.   I talked about how that was a misunderstanding on the part of those fans’. Well, this week Wired reported that McEwan himself has admitted that he was misunderstood, that he was not trying to downgrade science fiction and that he was even open to h...

The thing that I don’t understand about some science fiction writers is how they can straight out deny the genre as prophecy. The late Ursula Le Guin (may she rest in peace) did this and Corey Doctorow does do it, among others. It’s nearly obvious that yesterday’s science fiction has become today’s science fact. Even so, authors such as the above like to explain away this fact with their rationalisation. But does prophecy have to be unexplainable or supernatural (at least directly)? No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even have to predict the future correctly if at all. And so, like science fiction, prophecy doesn’t always get its visions of future society right. The science fiction writers who like to deny the genre being prophecy often use the rationale that sci fi is a criticism of today ’s issues re-im agin ed as futuristic ones. While this isn’t completely wrong, Ursula Le Guin thought of the genre in this way and Corey Doctorow does similar. Using Isaac Asimov as an examp...