Category Archives: Science

Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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The Drowned World

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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Patternmaster

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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In The Beginning…Was the Command Line

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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Idoru

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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Ray Bradbury Was For The Humans

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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What Happened to Cyberpunk?

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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The Day of the Triffids

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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Inside Outside

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

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 … Continue reading →

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Distrust That Particular Flavor

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Claire L. Evans

In the early 1990s, William Gibson wrote Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a 300-line autobiographical poem saved on a 3.5″ floppy designed to erase itself after a single use. The book version accomplished the task in analogue: its pages were treated with … Continue reading →

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