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Left over from April:
XXI: Ursula Le Guin, The New Atlantis/Kim Stanley Robinson, The Blind Geometer
A Tor Double, probably bought a decade ago. The Le Guin is a short dystopia - a bureaucratic community on the brink of ecological collapse. Meanwhile a flooded land rises from beneath the ocean. I confess it hasn't stayed with me, a week on, but I'll need to reread it as it's a 1970s text. I haven't read the Francis Bacon it lifts its title from.
Robinson offers another dystopia, narrated by a severely sight-impaired mathematician who specialises in geometry and who has been asked to establish communication with someone whose brain appears to be shuffled. I fell off the maths (reading onnatrain with football fans is not recommended) and haven't diagrammed the story by chapter titles (OA, BC, CA' etc). Alongside this is the best story in the collection, "Return to Rainbow Bridge", a recollection of a hike on Navaho territory to a natural stone arch which has since been flooded by a reservoir. The narrator decides to cut across country, and is rescued by Paul, a Navaho, who simultaneously has got back to camp. A haunting tale, a rural equivalent of urban legend.
XXII: Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema
Read for review since about November. In fact I think this is a little mistitled - it's really Science Fiction Cinema Studies, and is more comfortable on the film theory than the wider sf mode, or even sf film. It tries to do three things: a history of sf film from Melies to the present day, a series of theoretically inflected readings of film (the family, gender, race, the body, the virtual) and interviews with practitioners. The down side of this is that it appears that films of one period are about race, and that this idea is ignbored in other decades, although there is some attempt at overlapping. The interviewees are an odd choice, with Paul Verhoeven and Roland Emmerich being the most obvious; Stan Winston is also a good choice; Joe Morton feels a little tokenistic (why not interview a female actor such as Weaver?) and Ken Russell is uninformative; Billy Gray is a long time on from his role in The Day the Earth Stood Still and William Gibson and Brian Aldiss don't say much useful about the film industry. Nor do the interveiews integrate with the chapters.
Projected total for year: 66. H'mmm.
XXI: Ursula Le Guin, The New Atlantis/Kim Stanley Robinson, The Blind Geometer
A Tor Double, probably bought a decade ago. The Le Guin is a short dystopia - a bureaucratic community on the brink of ecological collapse. Meanwhile a flooded land rises from beneath the ocean. I confess it hasn't stayed with me, a week on, but I'll need to reread it as it's a 1970s text. I haven't read the Francis Bacon it lifts its title from.
Robinson offers another dystopia, narrated by a severely sight-impaired mathematician who specialises in geometry and who has been asked to establish communication with someone whose brain appears to be shuffled. I fell off the maths (reading onnatrain with football fans is not recommended) and haven't diagrammed the story by chapter titles (OA, BC, CA' etc). Alongside this is the best story in the collection, "Return to Rainbow Bridge", a recollection of a hike on Navaho territory to a natural stone arch which has since been flooded by a reservoir. The narrator decides to cut across country, and is rescued by Paul, a Navaho, who simultaneously has got back to camp. A haunting tale, a rural equivalent of urban legend.
XXII: Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema
Read for review since about November. In fact I think this is a little mistitled - it's really Science Fiction Cinema Studies, and is more comfortable on the film theory than the wider sf mode, or even sf film. It tries to do three things: a history of sf film from Melies to the present day, a series of theoretically inflected readings of film (the family, gender, race, the body, the virtual) and interviews with practitioners. The down side of this is that it appears that films of one period are about race, and that this idea is ignbored in other decades, although there is some attempt at overlapping. The interviewees are an odd choice, with Paul Verhoeven and Roland Emmerich being the most obvious; Stan Winston is also a good choice; Joe Morton feels a little tokenistic (why not interview a female actor such as Weaver?) and Ken Russell is uninformative; Billy Gray is a long time on from his role in The Day the Earth Stood Still and William Gibson and Brian Aldiss don't say much useful about the film industry. Nor do the interveiews integrate with the chapters.
Projected total for year: 66. H'mmm.
