Urban Honking

Ray Bradbury always seemed out of synch with the contemporary science fiction milieu: he wrote on a typewriter until the end, was sentimental, loved circuses, dreams, toys, fantasies, myths, loathed technology to the point of never driving a car, and never concerned himself much with scientific fact. Reading Listen to the Echoes, a book of conversations between […]

Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface. To share Ballard with someone is […]

I have an arcane personal system for reading. It’s basically a hierarchy of dog-earing: big folds at the top corners of the page when I put a book down, and precise little tucks on the bottom corners when a passage strikes my interest. Later, when I have a pen, I trace back through the dog-eared […]

When Neal Stephenson penned In the Beginning…Was the Command Line in 1999, a book of technical essays had a short shelf life. Now, it’s almost inconceivable that a writer would dedicate as much time to lovingly detailing the essence of his favorite operating systems; by the time the book was released, it’d be obsolete. And […]

As a rule, I avoid judging the quality of a science fiction novel by the success of its predictions. For one, it’s too easy. And I inherently distrust any method of judging literature as cleanly qualitative as “did this invention end up being true”? Although science fiction’s role isn’t necessarily to be prophetic, it often […]

  When the land feels too large I head to the orchard.  Yes, the orchard is four times the size of my vegetable plot.  But the trees are countable.  The nectarines end and apricots begin.  The apricots end where the figs start.  The small section of figs presses against the peaches.  In the orchard I […]

It was the summer of 1992 when I picked up my first Ray Bradbury novel at a yard sale. A paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles beat up beyond repair, it still surreptitiously toted the markings of a public library on its inside jacket pocket. I was eight. I slipped out the library card; no one had […]

Any regular reader of Space Canon knows my fondness for cyberpunk; Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling have all received breathless passes on these pages. Cyberpunk at its peak–before the movement was co-opted by 90s ‘netsploitation flicks and video games–was sexy, prescient, fiercely countercultural, and absolutely the medium most fit for our impending technological milieu. […]

Hi. This is about a deceptively stuffy British novel, The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. I really like postwar British science fiction. There’s something richly strange and dissociative about the juxtaposition of pure fantasy and Britannic reasonableness; I suppose being civilized in the face of abject horror would be an inevitable literary coping mechanism of […]

Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only […]