Blog Archives

It is very easy to miss that the single most culturally dominant work of fiction during the Advent season just happens to be Blue SF. It’s ghosts are simply horrific, its scenes cruel and unyielding, and its sense of time travel is only bound by relativity. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. The best liberal […]

The air is full of rumours of War. The European nations stand fully armed and prepared for instant mobilisation. Authorities are agreed that a GREAT WAR must break out in the immediate future , and this war will be fought under novel and surprising conditions. All the facts seem to indicate that the coming conflict […]

Jessie Rennie’s grand experiment fusing science fiction and philosophy moves boldly into its second phase, and the resulting reaction – if not exactly stellar in its synthesis, or nuclear in its power, is still good enough to spark off a few neurons. Only a few neurons, because the bulk of these tales seem to end […]

Noah Berlatsky at the Atlantic declares science fiction dead of terminal nostalgia: Poor George Orwell wants his panopticon back. He also quotes an important fresh voice* in science fiction that: “we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and […]

The Nexx Timecasters saw clearly that that tampering of prior eras were all part of a grand pattern of confusion; that any effort to manipulate reality via temporal policing was doomed only to further weaken the fabric. When you patch time, you poke holes in it; and patching the patches makes more holes, requiring still […]

Speculative fiction is easily fragmented by both readers and the industry, and even the professionals are capable of causing enormous rifts between major wings: look no further than the mid-nineties’ hilariously unnecessary epic saga of the SFWA consideration for changing its acronym to SFFWA. But the truth is simple: of the three major genres, Science […]

By 1995 or so, it had become fairly evident that the science fiction market had begun to experience a significant shift, one that I have been struggling to put my finger on for quite some time now. The genre, of course, has always been one for whom change at a certain level should be something […]

Pink vs Blue: Which side of the force are you? [Photo by Gerry Lauzon] Castalia blogger Daniel Eness has a great post breaking down the differences between Pink and Blue Science Fiction and Fantasy. If that sort of thing interests you, check it out and meet me back here. I would like to focus on […]

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human […]

“I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The ‘Life Force’, the worship […]

As a longtime reader of Vox Popoli, I half expected Vox Day’s fantasy world of Selenoth to be populated with ankle-biting trolls, fat frogs, and lizard queens, the landscape charred from the 4G war between the flaming sword-wielding libertarian knights and the glock-toting social justice warriors. Instead of the archetypal dark fantasy fortress we would find a […]