"[…] cheerfully preposterous."

“The Shining is introspective, austere, and unsettlingly plausible, which is why it comes to mind whenever you visit a creepy hotel, play croquet, or see an angry dad with his kid. But [Stephen King's] Doctor Sleep, which feels less like a sequel and more like a spinoff, is unapologetically fun, free-wheeling, and bizarre.

     It’s about a wandering band of psychic vampires who stalk clairvoyant children, kill them, and then inhale their 'steam,' or psychic energy, for food. A grownup Dan Torrance—the little boy from The Shining —must help a young girl fight off these vampires, who have sensed her psychic abilities from afar and have chosen her as their meal of the week. In place of its predecessor’s unsettling familial violence, Doctor Sleep has thrilling gunfights, absurd satanic rituals, and wildly entertaining telepathic showdowns. In a chatty author’s note, King more or less admits that he didn’t try to make Doctor Sleep as terrifying as The Shining: 'Nothing can live up to the memory of a good scare,' he writes, 'especially if administered to one who is young and impressionable.' Instead, he says, he set out to tell 'a kick-ass story.' He succeeded."
— Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
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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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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

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

"[...] unabashed termite art."

"Robert Sheckley wrote tightly crafted, whacked-out social satire in the form of science-fiction stories, using the conceit of future worlds to provide an alienating vantage point on the present. His heyday was the 1950s, when he emerged as a young writer in the pages of thumb-staining pulp mags like Galaxy, Astounding, and Infinity. Sheckley was part of a generation that disassembled the square-jawed tropes of 1920s space operas to produce a new, proto-postmodernist mode of literature, hidden within a genre that many readers at the time dismissed as kiddie lit. Unlike the more mainstream-friendly sentimentalism of Ray Bradbury, or the soberly cosmological world building of Isaac Asimov, Sheckley’s work is unabashed termite art. He illuminates standard sci-fi’s cutout characters and quasi-magical contraptions with a hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrancy, spinning yarns more fabulist than plausible, banged out as permutations of his own pet obsessions, among them mind control, extraterrestrial psychology, and the cruelties of love. [...]

     Though Sheckley continued to write almost up until his death in 2005, Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich’s new collection, Store of the Worlds, leans heavily on the author’s work from the 1950s, including just four tales written in the 1960s, and one in the 1970s. In keeping with the implicit goal of other NYRB science-fiction reissues, they want to rescue Sheckley from the genre ghetto, but at the same time make clear that his talent could only have been forged within that particular crucible."
— Ed Halter, BookForum
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