NYT, Jamelle Bouie, 18 Oct 2022: The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has.
The quoted phrase is, of course, the title of a famous 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, on the idea that the fascism of Hitler’s Germany could never happen in the US.
Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook, October 16, 2022 (Sunday)
Richardson, a political historian, posts several times a week with longish (2 to 3 screens) summaries of recent events, grounded in historical perspective. This one is about the connection between voter suppression by Republicans and resistance to Reagan’s “supply-side economics” (so-called “trickle-down economics”) in the 1980s. I’d never made the connection, but she makes it sound inevitably reasonable.
This week’s Sunday novella is “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. It was first published on the (long-gone) website Sci Fiction on May 2, 2001. (The site, edited by Ellen Datlow, won a Hugo Award in 2005 and was disbanded by its owner, the SciFi.com website, a few months later.)
Subsequently the story has been published, aside from in these Dozois anthologies, in Breathmoss and Other Exhalations in 2004, and in a “Best of” ebook-only collection from Open Road in 2013.
The story is as much meditation as a story. Continue reading
Frederik Pohl, the SF writer and editor who wrote Gateway and many other novels, once wrote a book called Chasing Science: Science as a Spectator Sport, which was about him not being a scientist, but interesting in following new scientific developments.
This is roughly where I am. I have a degree in math, took some science courses in college, but most of my understanding of science has come through reading books, beginning with Isaac Asimov’s collections of F&SF essays (beginning with Only a Trillion) and onward through books by Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.
Here’s a short little book that is basic but substantive. Familiar yet essential. Frankly, if I had seen it in a bookstore, I would have glanced through it and likely set it back down. Seeing it online made it difficult to tell how small a book it is. Still, it’s good to once in a while review the very basics, and this book does so nicely.
This is what would be called a “literary science fiction” novel in that it’s clearly SF yet is written by a writer with a “literary” background rather than one in the SF genre, and so whose approach would be expected to vary from the interests of genre science fiction writers and readers. Mandel (the St. John is a middle name) came to prominence a few years ago with STATION ELEVEN (2014), which I haven’t read but which I gather was about the aftermath of a worldwide plague (it won an Arthur C. Clarke Award); after that came THE GLASS HOTEL (2020), which seemed to have such a slight genre element that haven’t even bought a copy. (Too many books…)
SEA OF TRANQUILITY is about time travel and the idea that the universe might be a simulation, focusing on a situation the author calls an “anomaly” and which is likened to a “file corruption” (as if the simulation is run on some huge computer). The “anomaly” manifests via various people in different times and places (including the Moon) who experience a momentary connection. That’s the boiled down technical summary.
Andrew Sullivan and Connie Willis on the current state of affairs; End-times thinking; Edsall on Two Americas; the crushing of American socialism; more items about politics and religion.
This week’s Sunday novella is “Tendeléo’s Story” by Ian McDonald. It was first published as a chapbook by PS Publishing (in the UK), both in hardcover and paperback, in 2000. Subsequently it’s been published, aside from in the Dozois anthologies under review, in The Best of Ian McDonald in 2016 and in Neil Clarke’s anthology Not One of Us in 2018. I have the paperback edition of the chapbook, copy 25 of 500, signed by the author (whom I’ve never met).
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