- A video of that evening with William Gibson is now online at SciFiLondon.TV
- You remember last year’s rather good sf season on BBC4? This year they’re doing comics. It starts tomorrow.
- Paul Kincaid’s latest sf sceptic column: We are all science fictionists now
- Matt Cheney and Jeff VanderMeer comment on Gwyneth Jones’ review of Best American Fantasy at Strange Horizons
- Clarkesworld Magazine is now also seeking nonfiction
- Ellen Datlow’s Worldcon report
- John Clute reviews The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
- Colin Greenland reviews The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
- Matt Cheney reviews Right Livelihoods by Rick Moody
- Christopher Barzak has put the seed story for his novel One For Sorrow online: “Dead Boy Found“
- Why James Wood is a wronghead; and more here. Thank god; I was beginning to think people took him seriously
- Ridley Scott says sf cinema is dead; Martin McGrath disagrees and links to further counterargument
- And finally: Strange Horizons is advertising, in its typically low-key way, for various positions
September 9, 2007 at 11:31 pm
There’s also a BBC4 series on Fantasy somewhere in the pipeline.
September 11, 2007 at 12:58 am
I take James Wood seriously. I think he’s thorough-going and serious-minded. His thinking has never struck me as too left field; it seems to have foregrounded the more serious parts of Pauline Kael’s film criticism and is a more specific, less systematic working out of Iris Murdoch’s writings on art. Not that I’d call those two women his influences but all three run in the same direction.
I didn’t read the DeLillo article because I have read neither enough DeLillo nor enough of Wood’s on DeLillo to be able to form a proper response to it but the second article seems to be chasing its own tail. The content of lots of artistic work, from ‘Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Veronica Mars’, has been criticised as immoral for longer than a short time now. When the author writes “I like and admire the fiction of DeLillo, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, et al. Does that make me morally suspect in Wood’s eyes? “, I can’t help but think he misunderstands Wood pretty seriously: the reader doesn’t share in the author’s sin; the reader is sinned against.
And the weirdness of Beckett, Nabakov and O’Connor interests Wood too; they have written about post-apocalyptic landscapes, invented nations and the appearance of the Holy Spirit respectively and he’s spoken rapturously of all three.
September 11, 2007 at 8:54 am
“I like and admire the fiction of DeLillo, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, et al. Does that make me morally suspect in Wood’s eyes? “, I can’t help but think he misunderstands Wood pretty seriously: the reader doesn’t share in the author’s sin; the reader is sinned against.
No, go and read Wood’s stuff on hysterical realism. If you like those writers, you do share the sin, in Wood’s eyes; you are an insufficiently sophisticated reader.
September 14, 2007 at 1:56 am
It’s been some time since I read that essay so forgive me if I’m misremembering but I don’t believe Wood draws the readership into the moral fray. Listening to and entertaining distortions of reality isn’t a moral shortcoming; telling them is. The writers are playing in the moral sphere because Wood sees them as, essentially, lying.