Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Steven Pinker on Knowledge and Education

Posted on 19 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

From Steven Pinker’s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, chapter 16, Knowledge, p233: The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life … Continue reading →

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Kingsley Amis, NEW MAPS OF HELL

Posted on 18 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Next in my series of reading nonfiction books about science fiction, proceeding in roughly chronological order, is this short book of six essays, originally presented as lectures at Princeton in 1959 and collected into book form in 1960. It’s by … Continue reading →

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Recent Links Saved from Facebook

Posted on 14 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Steven Pinker’s favorite books http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/steven-pinkers-10-favorite-books.html include title by Gamow, Dawkins, Deutsch, and his wife Sean Carroll’s correctives to Jordan Peterson’s fandom Cleaning your room is good; using pseudo-intellectual babble about archetypes to identify culture with masculinity is… Posted by Sean … Continue reading →

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Links from NYT recently, with Comments

Posted on 12 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Op-ed by Amy Sullivan in the New York Times, April 1 (posted March 31): Trump’s Christian Soldiers The recurring, amazing fact that the self-righteous evangelicals support someone like Trump. You could open a publishing press devoted to the theological and … Continue reading →

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Tim Crane, THE MEANING OF BELIEF

Posted on 11 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View This is a small volume that appeared in 2017 and was well-reviewed in the New York Times. The author is a philosopher, and as the subtitle indicates an atheist (he denies the … Continue reading →

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de Camp & de Camp, SCIENCE FICTION HANDBOOK, REVISED

Posted on 10 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “How to Write and Sell Imaginative Stories” This is more of a curiosity now, than an essential book of criticism or history, though it does reveal some attitudes of its time. I have a 1975 revision, show here, of … Continue reading →

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY

Posted on 9 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

This slender volume of magazine essays came out nearly a year ago, and I read it then, and thought it pleasant but nowhere near foundational. But since it still shows up on bestseller lists, nearly a year later, and has … Continue reading →

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James Blish’s ISSUES AT HAND

Posted on 5 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

James Blish, a science fiction author who emerged in roughly the same era as Damon Knight (they were born a year apart in 1920 and 1921 and both began publishing notable fiction in the early 1950s), wrote critical essays about … Continue reading →

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From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: My Own Journey to 2001

Posted on 3 April 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Yesterday, April 2, 2018, was the 50th anniversary of the release of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, still regarded as the best (or at least one of the best) science fiction films of all time, and as among the … Continue reading →

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Intro

Posted on 28 March 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

This is the blog and homepage of Mark R. Kelly, the founder of Locus Online in 1997 and of an index to science fiction awards in 2000 that became sfadb.com in 2012. I’m retired from my day job of 30 … Continue reading →

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