a rose by any other name...

From: Fork in My Eye

"One summer day when I was about twelve, I complained to a friend that I couldn’t find anything interesting to read. My friend gave a little laugh and said, Come with me. Leading me to her garage, she flicked on the light, waited a moment for dramatic effect, and said, Pick.

     I was in awe. One whole wall of the garage was covered by homemade bookshelves and those shelves were stuffed to overflowing with, what I would soon discover, were science fiction paperbacks.
     'They’re my dad’s,' my friend said. 'He’s kind of a sci fi junkie. You can borrow anything you want.'"
— Fork in My Eye
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From: Museu do Cinemaxunga

"If there's one thing science fiction fans love, it's an argument. And if there's one argument they love more than all others, it's the attempt to define what science fiction actually is, and what is or isn't included in that definition.
     David Barnett set fire to the dry tinder of the genre argument recently by declaring a preference for 'sci-fi' over the generally more respectable 'SF'? But, I hear the still sane among you declare, what does this even mean? And why should
you care?
     For the ever growing army of writers, bloggers, editors, critics, academics and just plain old obsessive fans of this thing that may (or may not) be called sci-fi, there is at least some method in this madness. Each name and definition reveals a different aspect of the immense creativity sheltering within sci-fi. Or SF. Or whatever the hell it's called! So, here is a brief glossary of the various competing definitions of sci-fi. […]"
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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Noon and Night

"'A young boy puts a feather into his mouth ... ' So, in 1993, began Jeff Noon's first novel, Vurt. It was something the like of which had never been seen before, and it established Noon – then a struggling 35-year-old playwright earning rent by working in the Deansgate branch of Waterstones and writing at night – as a figure of major promise in British science fiction.

     Twenty years on, Vurt is being republished in an anniversary edition with three new stories, but the Noon who wrote it is, if not a forgotten figure, then one who never quite achieved the recognition that seemed his inevitable due. […]
     Noon says he is more interested in 'subject matter and atmosphere than character and plot' – yet an exuberantly propulsive story ran through it. 'There are two drives I have,' he says. 'One is towards experimentation. The other is towards campfire storytelling.' […]



     Noon started to 'remix' sections of his own work. The first time he actually saw music software, he says, 'I was astonished. I was jealous. He could take a piece of music and turn it upside down, stretch it, slow it down, remix it ... everything, with all these amazing buttons. And I thought: "why can't I do that?" I was looking at different aspects of electronic culture and how that can affect prose. So what you call experimentation was to me a natural process of following that and trying to manipulate language in the same way that a musician manipulates music.'"
— Sam Leith, The Guardian
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Buy Jeff Noon's books here...

Paper Back, Paper Front

"Good Show Sir’s Art Direction: Imagine the future, my friend… men will be either glowing silver pillars of greatness or riding around on space microlights. Women? Well they’ll be in skintight body suits and stay on their knees all day. Sexist? No, not at all, people will look back at this cover and see our predictions as genius! I think…
Published 1958
 — Good Show Sir

See more wonderfully-bad, cover designs here...

And learn about F. L. Wallace (he deserved better) here...

Future...

"The future arrived much earlier in our house than anywhere else because my mother is an emerging technologies consultant. Her career has included stints as a circus horse groom, a tropical agronomist in Mauritania, and a desktop publisher. But for most of my life she has lived by her unusual ability to see beyond the glitchy demos of new tech to the faint outlines of another reality, just over the horizon. She takes these trembling hatchlings of ideas by the elbow, murmurs reassurances, and runs as fast as she can into the unknown.

     When the web and I were both young, in the mid-1990s (with 10,000 pages and a third-grade education to our respective names), video conferencing was my mom’s thing. We had our county’s first T1 fibre-optic line thanks to her, and I grew up in a house full of webcams, shuddering and starting with pictures of strangers in Hong Kong, New York and the Netherlands, to whom I’d have to wave when I got home from school. Later on, when I bought a webcam for the first time, I could not believe you had to pay for them — I thought of them as a readily available natural resource, spilling out from cardboard boxes under beds."
—Veronique Greenwood, Aeon
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For books by Richard Matheson and books about how we see the future — or how we used to see the future — go here...