Texts and Contexts

Back at the beginning of the month I read a book called Speaking with the Dead for review in The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, even though the book has practically nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy. It is devoted to a rather esoteric point of New Historicism (the whole book is built around one sentence in a work by Stephen Greenblatt) and I don’t want to say much more about it here since the review will be appearing in JFA. But I found myself considering one intriguing question in relation to the study of sf prompted by this book: why does so little sf criticism employ the tools of New Historicism?

Isle of Pines

Over the last few weeks I’ve done something like three reviews for Strange Horizons and two for SF Site, so I’ve not really had occasion to write much about books here. But as we were going to the Utopia Conference (about which more elsewhere) on Friday and Saturday, I took the opportunity to read one of the utopias I didn’t know before. Though I have to say that reading it is not such a big deal, since it occupies only about 20 pages of Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford, 1999).