Lost worlds and ports of call
Greg Beato at reason has an article on how government turned comic books into propaganda. The campaign against comic books and their subsequent regulation through the comic book code killed off a large number of titles, mostly on hype and scare tactics. The power of comic books was recognized by the government, who ran cartoons and comic strips in the midst of World War II.
The Hays Festival has launched free podcasts with talks by noted literary giants.
In a free weekly podcast which you can subscribe to using iTunes you can listen to some stirring past talks. The first 23 will include writers Seamus Heaney, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Harold Pinter, Nadime Gordimer and Ted Hughes.
I don’t a Kindle, and still read books the old fashioned way. Perhaps this is why, when a bug can destroy your entire eBook library. Some day I will stop buying paper books, and I can turn my selves into kindling, but I’m not quite there yet.
A site with brief reviews of libertarian-minded novels, grouped by theme. Some great ideas for reading here, with lots of room for additional books.
Learned today that Ken MacLeod’s novella, The Human Front will appear as a paperback on April 1st. The book includes an interview with MacLeod, as well as two essays on his social philosophy. I’m not sure if the interview and essays appeared in his collection from NESFA, Giant Lizards from Another Star, but the novella is there, as well as poems and other stories, essays and much more.
It’s amazing how scholars are unearthing long lost literary items. In this case it’s 50 poems by Rudyard Kipling (colonial apologist, natch), found while renovating a Manhattan house and elsewhere.
Kipling, like many humans, had his flaws, opinions that changed over time. Once pro-war, he turned bitterly anti-war after the death of his son in 1915.
“His texts have never properly been studied but things are starting to change,” said Pinney. “There is a treasure trove of uncollected, unpublished and unidentified work out there. I discovered another unrecorded item only recently and that sort of thing will keep happening. It is a tremendously exciting time for scholars and for fans of Kipling.”
From NPR, a review of Ariel Djanikian’s debut novel, The Office of Mercy, published on February 21 2013.
The government in question here is America-Five, one of a series of heavily guarded, technologically advanced communities that were founded after a worldwide disaster essentially destroyed most of civilization. America-Five is an attempt at a utopia; its scientists are at work on making humans immortal, and its citizens have only occasional attacks from tribes of people from “the Outside” to fear.
The young Natasha is assigned to work in the Office of Mercy, which is in charge of killing all the Outsiders it can find. Like everyone in America-Five, she’s been taught this is a necessary act of kindness. But when she’s sent Outside on a mission, she meets members of the Pine tribe, and starts to question the humanity of the government’s constant “sweeps.”
Amazon’s description has this fascinating paragraph:
The Office of Mercy is speculative fiction at its best with a deeply imagined, lush world, high-stakes adventure, and romance that will thrill fans of Suzanne Collins, Margaret Atwood, Justin Cronin, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
One of the few female pulp writers (at least to gain great attention and acclaim), C. L. Moore wrote stories for Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. She wrote classic stories about characters like Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith. Kirkus Reviews has a nice write-up of Moore’s life and fiction. After the death of her husband and collaborator Henry Kuttner, she switched to writing for Tv in the late 1950s, and then stopped writing altogether after her second marriage. She remained active in the sf community, but sadly her fiction is mainly out of print.
Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing covers the release of Peter Bagge’s new graphic novel, Reset. That reminds me I need to look for Bagge’s issues of Apocalypse Nerd that I once bought, as I think I missed out on a few. While Bagge’s art isn’t as graceful as some comics, his biting wit and weird characters are fairly unique and compelling in a strange sort of way.
An article over at NPR asks whether fiction can change how we think about ideas, framed around a novel by Barbara Kingsolver on global warming, er, climate change.
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