Raritania

New York: Penguin, 2011, pp. 432. In television and film the crusading reporter who does whatever it takes to get the story is a tired cli...

One of the debates currently roiling the section of the blogosphere devoted to science fiction is the one regarding the relative standing of...

When the question of the original James Bond novels comes up, most seem to mention Live and Let Die (1954), From Russia With Love (1957) o...

I have previously remarked here about the limitations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels as fantasy , his original conception of 007 as ...

Uncertainty and doubt has always been part of intellectual and cultural life--including that exceptionally large doubt as to whether anythin...

Postmodernist thought is famously marked by a suspicion of certainty and stress on subjectivity, and a tendency to view cultural production ...

My writing has tended to look at the ways in which the James Bond series has dated, or been exceeded--rather than why it endured so long. ...

Three years ago I published an article about the politics surrounding space development, in which I identified postmodernism with conservat...

S.M. Stirling's well-known Draka series presents a culture founded on a distillation of the most brutal elements in nineteenth century E...

Back in August New York magazine's Jonathan Chait published an article titled "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy is on Your Screen,...

One of the bigger stories of the past week (in and out of that part of the news media devoted to speculative fiction) was the sale of Lucas...

io9 has just posted a list of "Ten Science Fiction Novels That Will Definitely Never Be Movies." Robert Heinlein's novel Fri...

Science fiction writers have often displayed a propensity to downplay the extent to which the genre makes predictions about the future. (To ...

Over at his blog Through the Dark Labyrinth Paul Kincaid has posted the first part of a response to the buzz his September review of three...

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Thorstein Veblen expecte...