Trying to come up with a great idea for your next SF/fantasy story? Check out this handy chart. One caveat, though — all the protagonists are male, so some gender-switching might be in order.
Reading this review of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City, I’m reminded of this circular short story that appeared in The New Yorker last fall.
Trapped in space with a rowdy, unreliable Russian crew after the Chinese deploy mines around her vessel, lost astronaut Janice writes a series of letters to her boyfriend, Chase, stuck back on Earth. As their situation becomes more desperate and Janice deals with the knowledge that she has cancer and is doomed anyway, whether help comes or not, her letters to Chase take on a mystical, dreamlike quality.
Chase himself is the main character of Chronic City, so Janice’s missives to him form a sort of side story to the novel. But by themselves, they’re a beautiful, dreamy meditation on longing, loss, and outer space.
Lethem details his boyhood obsession with Philip K. Dick, and how the sci-fi genius helped launch his own career as a writer.
The parents of Régine Chassagne, half of the husband and wife duo at the heart of indie rock superstars The Arcade Fire, emigrated to Canada from Haiti before she was born. I’ve always loved the song “Haiti” on the groups first album, Funeral. Now I can read the lyrics, translated from Haitian French:
Haiti, my country,
Wounded mother I’ll never see.
My family set me free.
Throw my ashes in to the seaMy unborn cousins
Haunt the nights of Duvalier
Nothing stops our spirits,
Guns can’t kill what soldiers can’t see.In the forest we lie hiding,
Unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers’ angry yelling,
In the rivers we will go.All the stillborns (or walking dead) form an army,
Soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
Bring about our second birth.Haiti, never free,
Never fear to sound the alarm.
Your children have left,
In those days their blood was still warm.
The band does more than just sing about the past injustice in Haiti; money raised from their Neon Bible was donated to the charity Partners in Health, “to deliver high quality healthcare to the poor, and to break the cycle of poverty and disease.” Awesome.
International businesses are becoming more interested in investing in Haiti, whose unemployment rate hovers around 70%. The poor country seems to be caught in a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: it needs investment and jobs to create societal stability, but companies are unwilling to set up shop in an unstable country. President Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, is trying to help get things moving.
A set of notes detailing some different approaches for bookstores to take as we embark on our wild and woolly journey into our 21st-century media landscape. A few ideas: creating something more akin to a library and cafe, or perhaps shelving books according to publisher — accompanied by stronger branding by publishers, resulting in each publisher creating more of an identity by the types of books it publishes. (via The Millions)
This is fascinating: a summmary of a paper by John Garth that compares scenes and features from The Lord of the RIngs to aspects of the Great War that would have impressed themselves on the mind of a WWI soldier like J.R.R. Tolkien.
(via natsura)
When the small press publishing City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer’s first collection of novellas, told him he could have carte blanch designing the interior, he went a little overboard. Here explaining the long series of trials, bouts of self-doubt, and bursts of hubris that were necessary to bring City of Saints to press.
This is a long and sometimes agonizing essay, but it’s definitely worth the read. City of Saints was the first book VanderMeer published in his excellent Ambergris cycle. In a few weeks Finch, the last book in the cycle, will be released. VanderMeer has posted a retrospective in which he brings the entire Ambergris cycle to bed; that’s where I found this essay.
