Reprint: The End

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Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005.

Reprint: God

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Andrew M. Greely, Anthony Boucher, Arthur C Clarke, Dan Simmons, David Zindell, Donald Barthelme, Francis Godwin, Garry Kilworth, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, James Blish, James Morrow, m john harrison, Mary Doria Russell, Michael Bishop, Michael Moorcock, Olaf Stapledon, Paul McAuley, Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Walter M. Miller, William Tenn

And so, as we come to the end of another religious holiday, it is time to look at one of the most persistent themes of science fiction. It is a subject I find myself coming back to on a regular basis. I feel that God (as opposed to religion) has no part to play in science fiction, that the introduction of a figure who can casually change the whole nature of reality is lazy in science fictional terms. This particular iteration of the point came in one of my Cognitive Mapping columns that was first published in Vector 217 (May-June 2001).

Analysis

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Christopher Priest, Connie Willis, David Hartwell, James Morrow, John Banville, John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Kathryn Morrow, Pamela Zoline, Simon R. Green, Tom Godwin, Tony Daniel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vernor Vinge, Wyn Wachhorst, Yevgeny Zamiatin

I had always planned to end my run of daily posts on this blog on my birthday, but illness meant shifting it a day earlier.

I had a couple of things in mind when I started this exercise back at the beginning of August. The first and simplest reason was that I have, over the years, produced an awful lot of material that has only ever appeared in print media. So I thought it would be useful, for my purposes as much as anything, to start putting in online. It’s a start only. I’ve now put online a reasonable if random selection of reviews, articles, columns and interviews that have appeared in Vector, New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, various fanzines and convention publications over the last 14 years. It’s not everything from that period by any means, and I’ll periodically put up others over the next weeks and months, I just don’t intend to do it on such an intensive basis. As for earlier material: I’d like to do the same for that, but in those cases it will require scanning or retyping the pieces, and at the moment I have far too many other things on my mind.

The second reason was to revitalise the blog. I’ve never been systematic in putting pieces up here. At times, months can pass between posts. My intentions for the blog have always been low-key, but I had never intended such neglect. So I thought this would give me a regular pattern of posting for a while, with other reprintings waiting in the wings to sustain a more regular presence. And that worked, rather better than expected. Regular traffic on the blog has increased (a side effect, but welcome), and it has also inspired more original pieces from me than I think I’ve managed in any similar period for a long time.

So far, so good, therefore. But then …

Reprint: The SFWA European Hall of Fame

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Andreas Eschbach, Arthur C Clarke, Bernhard Ribbeck, Claude Dunyach, Cyrano de Bergerac, Damon Knight, David Hartwell, Eleni Aresenieva, James Morrow, Joao Barreiros, Joelle Wintrebert, Johanna Sinisalo, Johannes Kepler, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Antonio Cotrina, Jules Verne, Kathryn Morrow, Lucian Merisca, Marek S. Huberath, Ondrej Neff, Panagiotis Koustas, Pedro Jorge Romero, Philip Jose Farmer, Ricard de la Casa, Sergei Lukyanenko, Stanislaw Lem, Strugatskis, Valerio Evangelisti, W.J. Maryson, Zoran Zivkovic

My recovery of old reviews continues with another from The New York Review of SF, in this instance The SFWA European Hall of Fame edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow. The review appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction 234, February 2008.