Posts Tagged ‘The Year of the Flood’
Where to See Me at #MLA14
188. New Approaches to Science Fiction Criticism
Thursday, 9 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., McHenry, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Science Fiction and Utopian and Fantastic Literature
Presiding: Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana Univ.–Purdue Univ., Indianapolis
1. “If This Goes On: Science Fiction, Planetary Crisis, and the Ecological Humanities,” Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.
2. “Living in the Future: Science Fiction’s Queer Cultural Politics,” Alexis Lothian, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Gauging Speculative Physics: Ontological Reading as Critical Practice in Fictions of Science,”Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, Duke Univ.
4. “Jumping the Shark, Jumping the Page,” Jamie Skye Bianco, New York Univ.
411. Margaret Atwood’s Recent Work
Friday, 10 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., O’Hare, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Margaret Atwood Society
Presiding: Karma Waltonen, Univ. of California, Davis
Speakers: Gerry Canavan, Marquette Univ.; Rebecca Evans, Duke Univ.;Lauren J. Lacey, Edgewood Coll.; Debrah K. Raschke, Southeast Missouri State Univ.; Katherine V. Snyder, Univ. of California, Berkeley; Margrit Talpalaru, Univ. of Alberta
Atwood, Lethem, Robinson
I’m part of the year-end Independent Weekly “What Our Writers Are Reading” feature this week, with capsule reviews of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream. Here’s the takeaway ‘graph from the Robinson review:
In both genre and mainstream literary fiction, America’s vision of its future has been dominated for decades by dystopia and apocalypse. Robinson is perhaps the last, best utopian in American letters, unapologetically crafting in his novels visions of the better world that he believes can still emerge, through struggle, out of this one. Individual lives, he writes in The Years of Rice and Salt, always end with the tragedy of death; it’s only in the long history of collective struggle, over lifetimes, that we can hope to find the possibility of comedy, of happy endings. (As Martin Luther King put the same idea: “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”) The first principle for Robinson, King and any other citizen of Utopia is not just the belief that a better future is possible but the conviction that the dream of the future can help us save the present; in the two-millennial span and twisting grandfather paradoxes of Galileo’s Dream, that political and philosophical commitment is made, for the first time in Robinson’s long career, spellbindingly literal.
Thursday!
Thursday!
* I’ll be posting this year as a HASTAC Scholar at the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboatory. My first post is about status update activism of the sort that is all over your Facebook newsfeed today.
* Speaking of health care, Olympia Snowe now runs your health care.
* LRB makes an impressively desperate bid for my attention with Fredric Jameson’s review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood alongside reviews of Inglourious Basterds and Inherent Vice.
* Madoff-mania: The SEC—which he claims he was shortlisted to chair (!)— now admits it badly mishandled multiple investigations of his company. Still more here.
* Kevin Carey nicely notes the difficulty inherent to blogging about a book you’re two-thirds through with. Another post or two on Infinite Jest soon. The total collapse of blogging at A Supposedly Fun Blog is one of the great disappointments of Infinite Summer, I think.
* Hiding adjuncts so the U.S. News rankings can’t find them. Meanwhile, this year’s Washington Monthly undergraduate rankings leave Duke out of the Top 25.
* So you’ve invented a board game. (via)
* 68 Sci-Fi Sites to See in the U.S.
* And Gawker declares the Michael Cera backlash has officially begun.
Le Guin v. Atwood
Ursula K. Le Guin reviews Margaret Atwood’s quasi-sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and refuses to let her pretend what she’s writing isn’t science fiction.