Urban Honking

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is a short novel comprised of even shorter stories, presented in roughly chronological order, covering a billion year spree of humanity (I have to wonder if Brian Aldiss took a page from Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men). The sections are broken into ages, long eras of the future, with […]

“Brightness falls from the air” is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkes will devour; Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have […]

Odd John and Sirius are two novels by Olaf Stapledon, paired together in a dual edition. This is not a thoughtless choice, as both novels are explorations of the same idea, manifested slightly differently: what happens when a superhuman intelligence is introduced into a human world? How long can it survive? When I say “superhuman […]

This is the deal: it’s impossible for me to separate Phililp K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from its film adaptation, Blade Runner. This is because I’ve seen Blade Runner approximately 4,000 times, and because my science fiction-obsessed college professors would always build elaborate paper castles of syllabi, heavy on the words “dystopia” […]

Frank Herbert is one of my heroes, for a number of reasons: his incredible commitment to portraying the whole ecology of a fictional environment, his sly allusions to philosophy, the overwhelming headiness of his work, his Northwest roots. This devotion, however, is entirely based on the commanding Dune series, which, as it has for many […]

The Ice People is a lesser-known French science fiction novel by René Barjavel. In French, it is known by the more nuanced title, La Nuit Des Temps (the Night of Time). I chose it primarily because I was bewitched by the cover design and the promise of its Frenchness. Incidentally, I really like the quiet […]

As far as science fiction anthologies go, Quark #1 is weird. Co-edited in the early 70s by the poet Marilyn Hacker and Samuel Delany (who were married at the time, but have long since separated and both self-identified as homosexual), it purports to be an quarterly of “speculative fiction,” an all-encompassing buzzword for outsider literature […]

SpaceCanon: I wanted to talk to you about War with the Newts Evan: Oh yea! I love that book SpaceCanon: yeah man me too Evan: In addition to many other things, I feel like it is the missing link between modern science fiction and like Frankenstein and Dracula SpaceCanon: it’s so tenuously “science fiction” SpaceCanon: […]

Hello readers, and welcome to a very significant redesign of this nascent blog. For those of you who don’t collect science magazines from the mid-80s, the new Space Canon design is a serious homage to OMNI, a seminal publication that ran from the late 1970s to the mid-90s. OMNI was a science magazine, but it […]